Shadow of the Dragon
by Upside-down Jupiter
Summary: Makoto gets an abrupt reintroduction to her past life. Jupiter did not belong in a fairy tale, but neither did she have one to live in. Yuri, AmiMako, ReiMinako. Sorry guys, but major edit #2 is in the works, to be posted as a different fic yet again.
1. Sweat, Blood, Water, and Repentance

Sweat, Blood, Water, And Repentance: In Which A Cold Shower Might Not Be The Best Solution

Makoto Kino awoke with a jolt, staring wild-eyed around her as the fog of sleep lifted. She was surprised, and more than a little relieved, to find herself alone as usual, and in her own apartment.

"What the hell was all _that_ about?" she asked nobody in particular.

_**Ah, good times... **_The voice seemed to come from within her own mind, which made her immediately doubt her sanity. If she hadn't already encountered more unusual things in her time as a Sailor Senshi, she would have quickly called a psychiatrist. As it was, she thought about calling Rei, but was far too embarrassed, and resolved to tackle the problem on her own.

"Who are you?!" she questioned the voice aloud.

_**People have called me a lot of things, some more fitting than others. Let's see... Ten Red Rivers I liked, that one was nice and descriptive. The Dragon's Shadow, kind of poetic, no? No good, rotten, axe-happy bastardess; the less said about that, the better. Some people took to calling me death's next-door neighbor. There was Princess Jupiter, naturally. **_Makoto's eyes widened. Was she really hearing this? _**It was Bloody Mako in the papers, mostly. I've been Sailor Jupiter ever since decent armor fell by the wayside and schoolgirl outfits came into style for some ungodly reason. I am the Soldier of Thunder and Courage. And, most recently I have come to tolerate being referred to, in high-pitched squeals, as Mako-chan. In other words, I am you.**_

"Great; if I'm talking to myself, I _know_ I'm nuts."

_**You also don't need to do it aloud. Nobody can hear me but you anyway.**_

_Oh, _that_ makes me feel so much better._

_**You're not crazy, you were just born with a destiny. My destiny. I don't really know what it'll be this time around, but I have no doubt it will be suitably glorious and violent. **_

_You meant to say "settled down with a nice, loyal husband who is secure enough in his masculinity that he doesn't mind that his wife can probably lift him over her head with one hand and use him as a javelin. And also a big garden, and maybe a nice pastry-shop," right?_

_**Good gods, what the hell did Serenity and that damn crystal **_**do**_** to me? Don't tell me you can't at least feel all the rage of nature boiling in your heart when you transform.**_

_Sure, and not just then. At the moment, however, I feel like I haven't slept at all. And like what I just woke up from was no ordinary sex dream._

_**Indeed. First of all, you don't dream so vividly. But you **_**do **_**have...**_

_Second of all, _Makoto interrupted herself, _I don't recall ever wearing armor in one. Leather, sure, but... _

_**You can talk about that later, Mako-chan. That's a whole other kettle of fish, and it's not what's eating you, so why don't you just spit it out?**_

_Very well, o Soldier of Thunder, Courage, and Carefully Chosen Words. _

_**Aw, a new one! Now cut it out before you make us both blush.**_

_Third of all, I do _NOT _have such dreams about other _girls! _Period! Let alone other Senshi. Ever since my old sempai abandoned me, I've been chasing boys right and left, and even up a wall that one time! Hmm, I feel a bit lightheaded now. Maybe I'm sick and the fever has affected my brain! That would explain everything._

_**Oh, sure, a fever. Methinks the lady doth repress too much. By the way, did I mention how very, very good it was?**_

_Oh, be quiet self. You sound like a less confused version of Minako, and you're really not helping. _Makoto threw aside her covers and stood up, choosing to ignore her alter-ego. Or possibly her masquerading id. This would have been more effective if she hadn't immediately been forced to sit down again when her knees gave way.

_**I **_**told **_**you it was a good one. Would you ever have thought **_**she **_**could do such things with her tongue? And always so modest about it, too...**_

_Ecchi! _

_**Why does everybody think that about me, when I just call it like I see it?! And often get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.**_

_Right. As for you, I reckon a good wash should do the trick. I don't want to smell like, um, sweat and such all day._

_**Mmm-hmm... And while you're in there...**_

_Oh, fuck off._

_**But of course; and the next time you need to transform, I could still be "off" fu...**_

_Point taken. Forget I said anything._

She rose again, this time with success, and stumbled into the bathroom, pulling half the sheets off the bed on the way. Just as a wave of sensations came flooding back to her, their intensity rivaling that of the dream itself, she jumped into her shower and turned the cold water on full blast. The cool rivulets that ran down her body only reminded her more of the caresses she had felt so keenly.

_Now that I think about it, it makes a lot of sense that _this_ wouldn't help. _Still, it was unlike her to be overcome so easily by the mere memory of a mere dream! She silently chastised herself until the voice of her past life jarred her out of it.

_**Well? Curious yet?**_

_So you _do_ know something! You probably caused this in the first place, Miss Decent Armor! So tell me: Why did I dream so vividly about _her?_ Why did it feel like she knew everything about my body, more than I know myself? As if she'd been my lover for years?_

_**Because she was. **_

_Don't fuck with me!_

_**Wouldn't dream of it. Now, hear me out. There're a lot of memories those cats won't give you because they don't think you can handle it or that your current society would accept them.**_

_What makes _you _so sure I _can?

**I **_**know you better than **_**you**_** do, and more than anything, I want her back. If all else fails, it's a good story! Not to mention that parts of it are pretty hilarious in retrospect. Unless you'd rather go to math class, of course. **_

_Well, I _do _hate math, and I have to admit there are several burning questions here._

_**Not to mention the fact that...**_

_Oh, no! I didn't finish my homework! _

_**I was wondering when that little realization would hit you.**_

_I don't recall you saying anything last night before I went to bed._

_**Hey, **_**I**_** don't like math any more than you do.**_

_Fine. Just tell me what happened, already!_

_**Hmm... Actually, it all started when I was taking a bath. And... You know, it would come across much better if I just showed you. Brace yourself. This may be a little disorienting.**_

Makoto found herself slipping into another dreamlike state. As the world around her seemed to dissolve and a new one to take form, she thought with a grimace, _Whatever this bizarre business is, I'm never going to be able to look Ami in the eye again..._


	2. For Love, Justice, and The Hell Of It

_(Author's note: Many thanks to Neuroleptic for, as he put it, "ripping the story a new one." By the way, that's really not how it came across. And without further ado...)_

For Love, Justice, And The Hell Of It: In which the soldier of lightning finds a much needed outlet

Princess Makoto of Jupiter had only spent two days on Earth's Moon, and already she wanted to hurt something. It wasn't that her quarters here were inadequate; far from it. But unfortunately, like just about everything else in the Lunar palace, they were done in white marble and silver accents, all with a cold sort of gleam. The effect was rather stifling for the sort of princess who was accustomed to spending her days outdoors with her soldiers and most of her nights in a tent or draped along a tree branch ready to leap on enemies passing below. In the effort to take her mind off her unpleasant feelings, she had flung her windows wide to the warm summer air, sharpened her weapons, polished her armor, single-handedly rearranged all of her furniture, and finally, drawn herself what she had hoped would be a relaxing bath.

By now, however, the water was growing cool around her, and it had done nothing to quell her restlessness and thirst for battle. With a sigh, she stood and began to wring out her hair. Pulling her robe around her shoulders, she stepped out onto her balcony. It was built out of that same lifeless white marble, but she felt a little better here where she could look out over a garden of pink roses and sweet-smelling yellow jasmine imported from Earth, leaves gently swaying in the light breeze. Her enjoyment of the flowers was hampered, however, by the fact that she felt a lot of empathy for those rose bushes that had been clipped into odd shapes rather than being allowed to grow as nature intended.

_Only a few thousand years ago, I would not be standing here, meekly waiting for the Queen of the Moon to summon me. I would probably have ignored this place and gone to plunder the riches of Venus. And once I'd finished with them, I could go back home and sleep very, very well. _

The enforced peace had not been easy for Makoto's people. Before Serenity's ancestors rose to power, the Jovians had relied largely on the spoils of war to provide for their needs. Their army would be gated onto the world they had chosen to target, headed by whichever fearsome Senshi of Thunder lived at the time, sweep like a hurricane across the planet's lands, and loot it thoroughly, leaving behind bloody ruin. Few had managed to stand against them when they came, and nowhere but Uranus and Saturn had been spared their depredations, and that was only because Uranus and Saturn had little that they wanted. They never stayed as an occupying force. By the beginning of what had come to be called the Lunar Age, they had bred the lust for battle so deeply into their blood that when they were forced to give up raiding other planets, they had turned on each other and thrown the planet into generations of chaos. Memories were long on most of the other worlds, and nobody except a few brave Uranians had come to shore up their stability. They were fragmented, but had yet to collapse, and such was the state of the society to this day. Even in these supposedly peaceful times, only the strongest, most brutal, and most skilled warriors had a chance at retaining control of the planet or the favor of its raging guardian spirit. And it was no coincidence that Makoto's family line had held onto its supremacy far longer than any had before.

_High-minded Serenity speaks of our fighting for such abstractions as love and justice, but turns a blind eye to the fact that at least one of us would fight anyway, simply for the sheer hell of it. Funny, isn't it, the way my attitude is considered obsolete, and yet I can still be such a useful tool for her? No one would have dared think of me that way if I'd lived back then. _

She sighed and raised her arms skyward, gently stretching her shoulders. The wind picked up almost as if in response to her gesture. It danced around her body in a pattern that promised to brew her a beautiful storm if only she would watch what it could do. As it grew stronger still, it gave the neatly trimmed hedges and carefully trained vines below a voice so wild no one would have believed it to look at them. Makoto fancied that they spoke real words to her in their rustling, urging her to forget her brooding and run out among them to receive the coming rain.

As black clouds mustered on the horizon and began their march across the sky, she made up her mind, rushing back indoors to throw on some proper clothes. _Ha!_ _Sorry, your Majesty. I _don't_ sit around waiting; not in glorious weather like this. _

As she made her way through the corridors of the palace, servants and even guardsmen edged out of her way with apprehensive looks, no one daring to question where she was going. _Hmm, security's not exactly on high alert around here, is it? Now, if I were a good fight, where would I be?_

As she reached the castle's main gate, one of the guards bowed deeply and handed her a scroll, saying "A word from the Imperial Queen of the Moon to her Highness, the Princess of Jupiter," before hastily backing away, giving the distinct impression that he thought she might literally bite his head off. She almost laughed out loud at the foresight Serenity had displayed and read the message in the shelter of the fortified entryway as rain began to fall.

"Princess Jupiter-

If you are anything like your mother, the gods grant rest to her soul, you have gone half mad with waiting and are heading out of the castle into a storm of your own creation. I must apologize for the delay, but know that you have my leave to go, so long as you return in time for the meeting tomorrow evening, at the fifth hour past the zenith. I would suggest that you make your way either to the outlying forest, or to the district that has come to be called Tornado Alley. I have the feeling you may find those places more interesting than the rest of the city."

At the bottom, in lieu of a signature, was a small image of a white rabbit and a black cat chasing each other in a circle, the arms of the Moon kingdom.

_Much more likely to be violence afoot in this 'alley' than in the woods,_ she thought. _Maybe I can even practice fighting for the sake of "love and justice."_

She asked the same guard for directions, amused at his palpable fear of further one-on-one conversation with her, and then headed down the hill toward Silver City, to the accompaniment of roaring thunder and the sharp scent of lightning.

To her dismay, most of what she saw at first was more white marble, with the occasional grassy space dominated by some ornate but equally white statue or fountain. Still, she reasoned, the city, like any other, was bound to be full of characters more colorful than its architecture would suggest. Following the directions she had been given, she passed by an armor repair shop that was just closing up, an Earth-style bakery from which rather delicious smells were emanating, and an open-air market that had been caught in the sudden and unexpected downpour and whose merchants were still frantically trying to remove their wares to a drier location. Most people were not moving about in the storm, and those few who had braved it were slogging through puddles with their noses wrinkled in disgust, darting under the flimsy protection of cloth awnings, accidentally splashing filthy water on each other, and grumbling their annoyance in widely varying accents.

At a place called the Spires, where four stone pinnacles stretched high into the darkened sky at wide intervals, she turned down a smaller side-street lined with seedy-looking establishments that might have been wine-shops, and then again might easily have been things much less savory. No white marble here, but absolutely nothing to recommend the place, either. A man leaning haphazardly against the side of one of the buildings slurred out a phrase Makoto didn't quite catch, but which sounded a lot like cross between a come-on and a racial epithet.

"I don't need any more reason than that to kill, tonight," she growled, turning to look him directly in the eye. Knowing that the symbol of her planet blazed green on her forehead as always, she let the hood of her cloak fall before finishing her thought. "But you're obviously too stupid, stinking drunk to appreciate the miniscule effort it would take for me to snap your neck." As funny as it was to see him sober up in a split second and start running as if chased by creatures from the blackest pits of hell, it didn't make her feel any better.

A short while later, she turned again, this time down a slightly broader and better lit road. _This should be the place unless that poor tongue-tied guard told me wrong. _It was fairly busy compared to the rest of the city, even with the storm still battering the streets. Among the passersby here, she saw more than a few pairs of luminous green eyes not unlike her own. She heard a phrase or two of a familiar song from home drifting out of a second story window and caught sight of a rather crowded tavern towards the place where the street dead-ended on a large and imposing stone structure, the details of which she couldn't make out very well. From this distance, it looked like someone in the tavern was standing on a table and fending off an angry mob by swinging a wine bottle at their heads when they got close enough, but she couldn't be too sure. She was just starting in that direction when a pair of voices from a dark gap between two nearby buildings caught her attention.

"They specifically said we were to put her somewhere off the beaten path," the first was saying. "I'm not entirely sure if this qualifies."

"We can just dump her here, anyway." The second voice was rough in contrast to the oily quality of the first, but both were filled with unmistakable malice. "Think about it! None of these filthy barbarians'll notice or care until she starts to stink worse than _they_ do."

_Now _that_ was uncalled-for!_

"When you actually _think,_ I like the way you do it," said the first voice. "After all, I wasn't about to carry her all the way out to the Sea of Clouds in miserable weather like this! Not if I could help it."

"Oh, like _you _ever do any of the carrying."

"Stuff it! If we start fighting now, someone will hear us and then the gods only know what will happen!"

Makoto chose that moment to step into their shadowy hiding place and clear her throat quietly. Both of the men turned towards her and froze. One was tall and broad in the shoulder, and would have cut a reasonably intimidating figure were he not so obviously scared out of his wits. The other was much shorter and on the fat side. As her eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness, she could see that they were standing over a dark bundle on the ground, presumably the "she" they had been referring to.

"Run!" screeched the short one. "We've got ourselves Senshi trouble now!"

"Oh, I'm running, all right, and I'm running quicker than you can." The taller man was doing his best to climb over the wall that closed off the alleyway. He wasn't having an easy time of it, but he was still making better progress than his companion. "Much as I've enjoyed being the guy who carries all the bodies around while you take most of the money, when the game's up, the game's up. Good luck talking down Bloody Mako! I've read she always skins her victims and dumps them into salt-pits before she'll let them die!"

The short man now looked as if he was going to be sick.

"Get your stories straight before you go spouting them everywhere!" she snarled, quickly closing the distance between them. "That was only _once!"_

The short man _was _sick. Fortunately, he was sick down his own front and nobody else had to suffer for it.

Makoto caught the big one by the hem of his cape and pulled him down off the top of the wall, grabbing onto his shoulder and then his hip. He kicked out at her, managing to connect only lightly with her side before she slammed him headfirst against one of the brick buildings. His brain splashed onto the walls and onto her hand and arm as she let his lifeless body fall to the ground, advancing now on his cowering associate.

"Who were the two of you working for?"

"N-n-nobody _y-you'd_ know..." he choked out.

"Try me."

"Well, uh, I...I don't know them either, they j-just wanted to get rid of... of that." He jerked his head toward the bundle. "I don't get paid to ask questions. I get paid to follow orders... Please, I'll do whatev..."

He didn't live to finish the word.

_No mercy. _Satisfied at last, Makoto unclenched her hands from around his neck, wiped them on her cloak, and went to examine the sheet-wrapped corpse they had been trying to dispose of.

_Hmm. Still warm, even._

Not really knowing why she was doing it, she carefully pulled the rain-soaked sheet away enough to reveal the head. The face was pale and covered in blood, some of which still looked fresh. It was framed by short cerulean hair with bangs that covered the better part of her forehead, which also seemed to be the location of the wound.

_Well, that hair might narrow it down. Whoever she was, her family's most likely from Uranus, Mercury, or Neptune. _Something tickled her hand just as she was about to replace the sheet. _Hold on... is she... breathing?! _Makoto put her hand on the young woman's chest, and felt a shallow rise and fall. _By all the gods and their mothers, great aunts, and pet rabbits! She _is_ breathing! I've got to get her to a healer, and fast! _

Though Makoto was very careful as she lifted the girl in her arms, the hand that supported her head still managed to pull some of the bangs loose from the clotted blood, enough to reveal a glowing blue symbol beneath.

"Mercury..." she breathed, one glance telling her that much.

One arm lifted feebly as if to brush more of the hair away.

_She's coming to. Blast it, what _is_ her name? Oh, right. _"Princess Sayori, can you hear me?"

"Not Sayori," she groaned quietly in reply, her words slurring a little. "I'm not even a princess."

It seemed to Makoto that she had rid herself of her own problem only to have someone else's thrust upon her, and this one was already looking much more complicated than a simple case of needing some action.


	3. The Illusionist

_(Author's Note: This chapter drove me nuts! It's still driving me nuts! Bear in mind that I've already gone nuts rewriting this and... Unicorns!)_

The Illusionist: In which physics has trouble with Ami

(Present time)

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Ami Mizuno was studying, her homework spread out across her desk like some would-be conqueror's map of the world, pencil poised over the final problem like a dagger over the capitol of a rebellious province. The beautiful morning sky visible through her open window was completely lost on her, as was the rain-scented breeze that rustled her curtains. The outside world might as well have not existed, and sometimes, she really preferred it that way. Especially if she was trying to concentrate on work and it felt like the only thing she could think about was...

_**She'll come back to me.**_

"Arrgh!" Ami jumped about three feet in the air from a seated position, which would have been an impressive feat if anyone else had been there to witness it. The pencil flew out of her hand and clattered against the opposite wall. "Mercury, could you please _not_ sneak up on me like that?" She sighed as a duplicate of herself materialized beside her desk; this particular duplicate was dressed as Sailor Mercury, rather than in school uniform. She handed Ami the lost pencil with a barely perceptible twitch at one corner of her mouth. "What brings you here, anyway? Is Usagi in danger? Who's coming back?"

"You made a mistake, right there," said Mercury, gesturing at one of Ami's physics problems with a white-gloved hand. "Variable psi is off by point..."

"Oh, goodness! Thank you!" Ami quickly took an eraser to the problem in question and recalculated her answer before Mercury could even get the rest of the number out.

"That's an error anyone could have made. Anyone but you, that is. That's troubling in and of itself, but I must also consider the fact that you have been avoiding sleep like the plague. It's six-thirty in the morning and you haven't been to bed yet."

"No, I haven't, have I? So, who's coming back?"

"Why won't you take care of yourself? You'll get sick if you don't sleep, you know."

"I'll get sick if I _do _sleep. Please just tell me what's gone wrong now, so I can go make sure the others at least confine most of the collateral damage to the city of Tokyo while they're killing it."

"Troubling dreams, I take it?"

"To put it mildly. Now, is there a new enemy, or just a problem that requires me to push myself beyond the limits of what I am?"

"Hmm. You dropped me a nice hint; I suppose it's only fair that I reciprocate: nothing has gone wrong whatsoever."

"Whatever you have to say, it must not be important if you're being _this _cryptic about it."

"It was_ very_ important to me, when I lived. And unless I miss my guess, you will find it most relevant to your interests."

"Ooo!" Ami brightened instantly. "Does it have anything to do with supersymmetric quantum mechanics?"

Mercury rolled her eyes at her less supernatural counterpart. "Don't be such an ass, Ami. I meant your _other_ interests."

"And just what would _you _know about my other interests?" Ami demanded, blushing the sort of blush that was beyond the endurance of most ordinary humans.

"More than you do, I'd bet."

"Oh," she said flatly, returning to her homework, her cheeks still quite red.

"Now, why don't you tell me about these dreams that have left you too scared to sleep?" Mercury pressed on, draping an obscuring arm over Ami's notebook.

"I had thought that you, of all people, would understand my need to stay a few chapters ahead of the class," Ami grumbled. She pulled the notebook off the desk and continued to work with it lying in her lap.

With an exasperated sigh, Mercury sat on it. "You're already more than a few chapters ahead of your class. You have time to talk to me about this. It could even be more important than you think it is."

"Um, don't take this wrong, but it's kind of surreal to have you sitting in my lap."

"Don't change the subject."

Ami rolled her chair back abruptly and Mercury landed on her ass in a most undignified manner. "You want to know that badly? Fine. In the dream, I'm in this metal cage with barely enough room to inhale. I'm bleeding; I know I have at least one head wound. I know I ought to be dead, but somehow I'm still breathing. People are watching me, and they're all whispering amongst themselves about how wrong it seems to do such things to me, but their master must always be obeyed. One of them opens the side of the cage and puts a weird, glowing knife to my chest, and... Mercury, are you all right?"

"Possibly. Continue, please."

"I realize that even if I can't do anything else, I can stop my own heart and end this. It's my only way out; I know I have to do it, and so I do it. As I'm fading out, the people around me are panicking and turning on each other with accusations of incompetence and going too far. Then there's this blinding flash, and someone upstairs screams that there's a fire spreading in her workshop, and that's when I wake up. I know it sounds stupid in retrospect, but when I'm in it, it's real. Are you sure you're all right? You're awfully pale."

"Well, you _did _just recount a memory I had hoped you might be spared."

"So, now you can tell me who you were thinking about so wistfully... wait, I just did _what,_ now?"

"You're remembering things. She saved my life twice that night, once before I even met her. If there hadn't been that storm, and if that bolt of lightning hadn't hit the laboratory they'd built on the cliffs, I would have stayed dead, and I'm not sure what would have happened then. As it was, in the confusion, someone had the less-than-brilliant idea of hiring locals to dispose of my body while everyone else was putting out fires. If they'd been thinking clearly they'd have just thrown me into the flames."

"So it wasJupiter, then. Don't you know she's already reincarnated and is fighting with us? Where in the world have you been?"

"For a genius, you sure are slow on the uptake."

"I'm going to ignore that, because there remains the question of how a princess ended up in that situation."

"I knew you would be kept in the dark to a certain extent, and to far less of an extent, I agree with that, but _this_ is ridiculous. Look, I was a lot of things in my lifetime, Ami, and some I will admit were more respectable than others. A princess, however, was not one of them."

"I suppose I should have guessed _I'd _be the one with the particularly unglamorous backstory."

"Well, I certainly couldn't envy the actual princess of Mercury, so don't go getting all indignant with me."

"Why? What happened to _her?" _

"It's a long story."

"One I could probably stand to hear, if it didn't involve missing classes."

"No one ever need know, and you aren't likely to miss anything." With a snap of Mercury's fingers, yet a third version Ami was called into being. This one bowed politely, took the physics homework from the original's astonished hands, and proceeded to leave, presumably for school.

"Hey, wait a minute! Why can't I do that when you're in my body?"

"You never tried."

"And you didn't tell me I could do more with this than call up a little mist, why?"

"You never even thought of as..."

"Never mind, don't answer that. Just tell me what happened."

"It would be easier if you just let me show you. Lie down."

"Why?"

"Because you'll fall down if you don't."

This seemed a sound enough reason for Ami, although she still wasn't entirely sure of what was going on. Mercury pressed a cool hand to her head, and she felt herself adrift on what seemed to be an ocean of time and memory, the possibility of which she would definitely have to puzzle over while everyone else was trying to justify the existence of the English language.

"Now, the second time Jupiter saved me..."


	4. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance: In which Mercury is surprised much more often than she had expected

The first thing Ami noticed as she came to was the sound of someone's windpipe being crushed. _Oh, well. He probably deserves it. _

She ignored the gurgling and continued to take stock of her situation. She was lying on the ground, wrapped in a soaking wet sheet and surrounded by the thick smells of blood and rain. The wounds on her head, chest and thighs were throbbing dully, and the raw patches where her skin had been worn by scraping against the sides of her cage were stinging like someone had rubbed them with salt. She had the feeling that if she were to open her eyes, the world would be spinning, and not just in the way that worlds always spun. This development, along with the hazy quality of her thoughts, was most unwelcome. However, she knew it could have been much worse.

She felt the presence of another person standing over her, just before a hand pulled the sheet from her head. She could feel the eyes on her, carefully scrutinizing her face, where she knew the blood had clotted itself into her hair. She held her breath as long as possible, hoping that the stranger, who had presumably just strangled someone, would satisfy their morbid curiosity before discovering that she was one of the Senshi and doubtlessly feeling compelled to announce it to the world at large. But she couldn't hold her breath forever, and whoever it was certainly seemed to be taking their sweet time. She had to exhale, and she could feel the other tense slightly when she did so. _Damn. _A hand on her chest quickly confirmed that she was alive, and it was a blessed mercy that it missed all her injuries or she might have cried out in pain.

She was not expecting what happened next, which was that the mysterious person picked her up as if she were a sack of feathers. She wasn't exactly heavy, especially not after the previous month's captivity, but to judge by the ease with which she was being lifted off the ground, this stranger possessed incredible strength. She wondered what sort of man he must be, but got her answer immediately.

_Wow._ _Undoubtedly a female one._

A minute blush somehow managed to cross her face. The hand that supported her head was gentle, if very new to being so. It was also callused from manual labor, or perhaps from wielding a weapon. With a mounting sense of dread, Ami felt it snag and pull some of her bangs away. Hopefully it would not be enough to make out the details of her mark. A growl of thunder gave the moment an appropriately ominous background, although by the sound of it and the lessening rain, the storm was beginning to move off. She instinctively tried to cover her face with her own hand, but found that her chest wounds screamed in protest at this effort, and thus only managed to raise her arm a little.

"Mercury," the woman whispered, incredulous.

_Damn again. _

That accent gave her pause. It was light, but definitely present, as if the speaker had been forced to sit through hours of diction lessons in both Common and High Lunar, rebelled, and gone back to doing whatever it was that gave her hands their roughness. _Martian? No, not quite right. Jovian? Sounds like it, but that doesn't make any sense._

"Princess Sayori, can you hear me?"

_That _is _a Jovian accent! _Ami opened a cautious eye onto a wildly swirling scene, and quickly closed it again before things could come into focus, feeling both dizzy and a little sick. "Not Sayori... I'm not even a princess," she said. Her voice felt so thick in her throat, she figured must have sounded like an idiot.

The woman seemed to consider this for a moment. "Right. You're not a princess. Then, who _are_ you?"

"Nobody important, really."

"Not true. I saw that mark on your forehead. You're Mercury, one way or another. What I _meant_ was have you got a name, or should I just refer to you as Not-Princess Mercury or Nobody Important?" The stranger had started walking, carrying her somewhere, painstakingly holding her head still.

"Ami. My name is Ami."

"Good, that's less of a mouthful. Hey! A little help here! This one's in bad shape!"

"Wait, who are you?" she started to ask, but stopped abruptly when she felt herself being shifted so the Jovian could signal to someone. She chanced opening her eyes again, and found that she had been brought onto what looked like a fairly major city street, and that they stood in a patch of darkness between the pools of light cast by the magical lamps. Things no longer looked like they were swirling around her, but they were still obnoxiously fuzzy. A white-haired man was approaching them, holding up a hooded lantern, and trying to get a look at her. She buried her face in the woman's emerald green tunic, hiding from both the unwelcome light and the prying eyes.

"Good gods, it's Ten Red Rivers herself! Princess, my throat is bare!"

"My axe is sharp," responded the woman holding Ami. She knew, from listening to some of the foreigners who came through her part of Mercury's capital city, that for a pair of Jovians this opening exchange was near excruciatingly polite, and that almost nobody else ever understood it that way. "It's not with me at the moment, though. Right now, _she_ needs a fix-up,_ I _could stand a stiff drink, and someone should probably clean up that mess."

_Wait, he definitely meant her when he said... Right, I'm hearing things. There's no way in hell..._

"The nearest healer's in the nearest place to get a drink, highness. That'd be the Iron Scepter. You see all those lights down that way? There, where that chair just flew through the... ooh, that's gonna smart in the morning!" he laughed appreciatively. "I'll warn you, she's from Mars, but all the same she's not too bad. Does a decent enough job making sure those young hotheads don't all kill each other, at any rate, and she's the only one who'll be working on a night like this."

_No. This can't be Princess Jupiter. Why would _she_ go around picking up stray Mercurians? _

"Ha! Looks like it'd be my kind of place for entertainment, any other time. But I guess if steering someone in _her _condition through a crowd like _that_ to take a gamble on a Martian healer is the best we can do, then that's what we'll have to do. Thank you."

"I'll take care of things here. I am ever mindful of your blades."

"They never rest." The old man bowed at the dismissal and passed by the pair and into the deeper darkness they had come from. "I guess you got the answer to your question, hmm?"

Ami allowed her eyes to drift upward to the other woman's face, where she saw green eyes with an otherworldly gleam, and of course the telltale planetary symbol. _Thrice damn! I seem to be in over my head. _Her vision blurred again, becoming useless to her. "Y-you're really the one they call Bloody Mako? Er, your highness?" _Oh, why can't my words come out right?_

"Yes. And I seem to be living up to it right now. Although, I'm pretty sure a lot of this over _here_ is actually bits of brain, and there's definitely more mud on my boots than anything else."

"And, um, you're _not_ going to tear my heart out and eat it raw?" It was probably not the smartest subject to bring up, but Ami's wits didn't seem to be fully in command of her mouth at the moment. This was beginning to make her nervous about her chances of survival, and that nervousness in turn contributed to her lack of control. In other words, she was really starting to detest vicious circles. "I read somewhere that you..."

"Oh, not again. Look, it _wasn't_ raw! I had it roasted, on a bed of mixed greens, with a delicious red wine reduction sauce! I swear, the things people have been coming up with tonight! It makes me crazy!"

_Somehow, that revelation is even _more _disturbing, _thought Ami. _And just where did she find mixed greens and a red wine reduction in the middle of a battle?_

Fortunately, Princess Makoto sounded more amused than actually offended as she went on. "Besides, that was only once. So, no, I won't be eating any part of you. Instead, since I'm not actually a monster, I'm going to have someone see to your wounds and then hand you over to your people, who I'm sure will be grateful for your safe return."

"They'd be enormously grateful. Of course, tearing my heart out would be faster, and I'm reasonably certain it would hurt less." _I hope she doesn't take that as an invitation. Oh well, it's too late now._

"You're saying other Mercurians did this to you?"

"Yes, they did." _Hmm, my heart is still in and she sounds intrigued. I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing. Better keep talking in case she changes her mind. _"So, you understand why I'd sooner not go back. I'd rather they continue thinking that they actually killed me. And I can't say I'd trust anyone in this city to keep the fact that I'm still alive a secret, so a healer's attention would probably do more harm than good."

"Hm. And yet you're telling _me_ all this. Should I still be assuming that you don't want to die?"

_Uh oh. Time to clarify. _"I'd really prefer not to, if at all possible. And if I'm seen..." she trailed off at that, figuring that her point had been made.

"Of course... I know better than anyone the way word gets around." Jupiter sighed heavily, seemed to weigh her options for a moment, and then turned around and began to hurry back the way she had come. "I'll take you to the palace, and I'll bind your wounds myself. I can't promise that'll do much good, but you have my word I'll do whatever I can for you. None of the servants have the courage to enter my rooms, either, so you're not likely to be found out."

"Um... I... um, er... you are far too kind. I..." _Well,_ _if I wasn't in over my head before, I certainly am now. _

"Don't thank me just yet. I'm more in the business of causing injuries than fixing them. And as soon as you're back on your feet, I'm taking you to Queen Serenity. If you really aren't who you say you aren't, we might have yet another problem. Maybe there'll even be a war, not to say that I don't think things are just fine right now."

_Oh, we have a problem, all right. It was not being _her _that got me into this mess in the first place. Of course, if my powers had awakened, I could have eluded the King's Guard when they came for me, but that's neither here nor there. Now I just have to stay alive, and as soon as I can, I'll sneak away on my own and then fade back into the shadows. At least I heal fast enough that it won't take too long._

It did not take long for Jupiter to make her way back through the largely empty streets and up to the palace. Ami opened her eyes again, watching the annoyingly out-of-focus guards raise the creaking portcullis to let the princess reenter, wondering why they didn't seem to notice her own presence. True, she was doing her best to be inconspicuous. Be that as it may, it was rather difficult to be unobtrusive while being carried through corridors and up stairs. No one they passed even managed to meet Makoto's eyes, let alone inquire about just what or whom she had brought in with her. _I guess if I have to hide behind somebody for the time being, at least she's somebody everyone else is afraid to look behind. _

When they arrived, Jupiter's quarters were awash with the scents of roses, jasmine, and the aftermath of the storm, flowing in through the still-open windows, but that was not what captured Ami's attention. Instead, she stared in disbelief at the extensive display of weapons that she supposed must pass for ornament here. They were rather grim and utilitarian for the most part; almost all were of black steel, the blades of swords and axes visibly sharpened to a lethal edge, the heads of maces and hammers polished into a dark mirror sheen that reflected the yellow-orange flicker of a torch or the green of the bed-hangings in a fashion that was nothing if not sinister. _How could anyone possibly even know how to _use_ all of those, let alone feel the need to pack up the entire armory to leave home? And... are those real skulls over there on the mantelpiece? _

They were.

_Maybe she was serious about servants being afraid to come in here._

The white marble and cool silver of the palace's original decor threw it all into hideous relief, and Ami found herself suppressing a little shudder and squeezing her eyes shut yet again. Makoto pulled the sheet completely off of her and laid her down on a fur next to the gruesomely appointed fireplace.

"Gods, you're a real mess." She could hear the princess rummaging around somewhere near the bed. "Good thing I decided to bring this stuff after all."

Suddenly, the rough hands were back, carefully cleaning out the wound on her forehead with something that burned like acid but was probably just antiseptic. The pain was fleeting, and soon enough she found herself lulled by the tenderness of the touch. It was beyond stupidity to feel so safe here, in the very lair of this woman, who was known in all parts for the depths of depravity in which she conducted her daily life, who allegedly hunted people for mere sport, who had confirmed that on at least one occasion she had consumed human flesh, and furthermore, a hundred other terrible things could spring readily to mind... and who had carried her in her arms as carefully as if the Senshi of Mercury had been made from the delicate ice she was supposed to be able to command.

Cognitive dissonance and Makoto's sudden low whistle joined forces to snap her out of her sleepy thoughts. "This is enough to tell me you're a lot tougher than you look. A scrawny little thing like you would ordinarily be dead in a minute." The cut she was referring was the one over Ami's heart, where some sort of enchanted knife had sliced into her earlier. She looked down at it, startled to see that it was still slowly dripping crimson.

"It's the only good thing about being Mercury," she said with a twinge of bitterness deeper than her typical level. "I seem to always have just a little more blood in me. That should definitely have stopped by now, though."

"No. I know what kind of weapon did this. A Twilight Edge, or a Dagger of Bliss. Only fifteen left in all the kingdoms, and I've actually got one. They're Venusian-made, mostly pre-Lunar Age, nasty as hell, mostly used for... gathering intelligence, and banned everywhere except for Jupiter and, of course, Venus." She chuckled mirthlessly. "You would have bled until you were a dried-up husk that crumbled at the merest touch, and you might never have known until it was too late. But I know how to stop it. Someone must be speaking for you among the gods; I mean, really, what _are_ the odds?" Ami stared up at impending doom, as Makoto was standing over her with a faintly glowing serpentine dagger in hand. "I see you don't trust me," she sighed in obvious resignation. "I guess I can't fault you for that. Now I'll warn you, this might hurt a bit. Actually, a lot, but it's much better than the alternative."

Ami closed her eyes and hoped that if her death was going to be a painful one, it would at least be quick. Rather than stabbing her, however, the Jovian only laid the flat of the blade against the wound. It was as if the blood in her veins had turned to molten gold, searing its way from the tips of her fingers and toes all the way back to her heart, and she screamed with the agony of it until she couldn't anymore, and finally blacked out.

When she came to again, she could hear Makoto muttering something about nosy cat-men, and awkward questions. She still hurt all over, but her mind and senses were truly clear for the first time that whole evening. The rest of her injuries had been tended to, and although she could now feel the full extent of the pain radiating from all of them, some instinct within her body gave her the message that she was now much healthier, cleansed of whatever toxins had numbed her and kept her bleeding. She was rather surprised that she had been moved to the comfort of the soft bed, but before she could say anything to that effect, there was a cup of water being held to her lips.

"You'll need this." Indeed, she realized her throat was parched, and she drank gratefully. "I've made dinner, too."

"Thank you," Ami whispered, her voice still hoarse from screaming. _This is too weird for words. What kind of royalty _is_ she, anyway?_

"Hey, I know that look. Cut it out. If as many people had tried to poison _you_ as they have me, you'd learn your own way around a kitchen pretty quickly."

"I guess political business is done the same way everywhere, then," she found herself saying in response to the princess' quiet laughter.

"Of course. I love it so much I can't turn my back on it even for a second. Now come on and eat, before this cools off. You look like you haven't had a bite in weeks!"

At this point, Ami did not much care, and practically inhaled the soup she'd been offered, not even pausing to wonder about the unfamiliar herbs that flavored it. When she had finished, she chanced another, closer look at her unlikely savior, who was currently sitting on the end of the bed, turning the the Twilight Edge dagger over in her hand, apparently lost in thoughts that pleased her. She had let her hair down, and it hung past her waist in windblown auburn waves. One lock of it had fallen across her face, but it failed to hide the thin, white scar that ran down from her right cheekbone to the edge of her jaw, the only apparent mark of all the battles she had fought. _Nothing I ever read about her mentioned that she was this beautiful._ The emerald eyes that suddenly rose from the knife to meet hers seemed to have a genuine warmth to them, but as quickly as she had noticed it, the expression vanished, and when Makoto spoke again, her face had hardened into steely indifference, and her voice was just as cold.

"You should sleep now. In the morning, you'll tell me exactly how you ended up where I found you. I'll be outside."

She stood, turned on her heel, and walked through the glass door onto the balcony. Ami watched her curiously as she leant her elbows on the rain-slick railing and stared up at the sky, troubled shadows crossing her countenance. Exhaustion and restlessness warred in her mind, along with the odd impulse to follow the brooding Jovian onto the balcony and ask her what the matter was. Knowing she was most likely unwelcome outside, she quashed this urge and continued to watch and think about it instead.

_Maybe killing doesn't sit so well with her as it seems to... _

Makoto plucked one of the climbing roses that had insinuated itself into the balustrade and crushed the blossom in her hand with what looked like a frustrated sigh, tossing its bruised and dismembered remains over the edge.

_...or maybe that's not it at all. But in every cruelty, there must be the germ of a kindness. In the deepest darkness, someone, somewhere, will always hold up a light. Even in the mightiest fortress walls, there must be an open gate someplace. And in every supposed truth, there is something, however small, that is not so absolute._

Ami yawned.

_Well, so much for philosophizing. Hopefully I can get well and leave this place, and her, before I have to find any more of it. _Her exhaustion had won out at last; she drifted off into black nothingness again. And that was when both she and Jupiter found out that their new downstairs neighbor was Princess Mars.


	5. Murder Most Foul

Murder Most Foul: In which Rei's blood pressure skyrockets

(present time again)

A while after it had been broken by shouts of "GET OUT OF HERE!" and "AAAH! Forgive me, Rei-sama!" for the first time in several months, the silence of early morning in the interior of Hikawa Shrine was once more a deep and rich one, and Rei Hino was kneeling in the middle of it as she did so often, guiding her mind into the heart of the sacred flame.

Apparently, this was a bad time for it. At first, she could not make herself concentrate to save her life. But when she had finally calmed her jangling nerves down from her rude, late awakening, she was able to sit in stillness and contemplation, preparing for what promised to be a stressful and unpleasant day. She was at peace, if only for a few precious minutes, and that would have to be enough...

"CAW! CAW!" Following this enigmatic pronouncement, a sharp beak pecked at her left ear and she was snapped out of it. Phobos and Deimos had landed on her, one on each shoulder, and were now insistently tugging on strands of her hair, pulling her through the entrance of her meditation room. The crows led her towards the courtyard, chattering all the while. The dam on her frustration burst.

"What is the _matter_ with everything today? I mean, first I wake up late and find that stupid Yuuichirou has started watching me sleep again! And now you two interrupt my meditation by acting like a couple of overexcited puppies! This had better be im..."

When she opened the door to the outside, she barely recognized the place; it was blanketed in a solid layer of squabbling crows, rooks, and even ravens, well out of their ordinary range. "...portant," she finished weakly. _What the...?_ _Oh, great. That's going to be hell to clean up after._

The birds had been making such an unholy racket of cawing and screeching that the phenomenon had drawn a small crowd of humans as well. As she stepped out of the door, their mutterings against her became audible as a hush fell over the avian congregation. Phobos and Deimos left her shoulders and lost themselves among the sea of their black-feathered fellows.

"This... is... ridiculous." She had picked up her broom and was punctuating her words by swinging it about like a polearm, vainly trying to dislodge what seemed to be the entire genus _corvus _from the temple courtyard. "Go on! _Shoo!"_

The human onlookers seemed to get the message, and hurried about their business, but the birds stood their ground. Rei glared down at the lot of them, and they stared right back up at her with an expectant air. "What? What are you looking at?" she snapped, feeling more than a little silly.

"Mars-that-is," croaked the nearest and largest, peering at her intently with its clever, beady eyes. _All right, Rei. Calm down. If you can believe in talking cats, a talking crow isn't that hard to imagine. On the other hand, how does it know your secret identity?_

"Who sent you? What's going on here? How the hell are you talking?"

"Mars-that-was says it is time for you to remember."

"What? If my past self wants to contact me, then why doesn't she just appear in my fire or something like that? Not only that, but I'm too busy!"

"Earth still holds some bad memories for her. She would rather not visit it unless there is a battle. Also, she didn't really want to make a big production out of this."

Of all the Inner Senshi, Rei was probably the most accustomed to blatantly supernatural occurrences. However, to suggest that the current state of the shrine's grounds didn't count as "a big production" was simply beyond the pale. Add to _that_ the talking bird, and "the pale" was but a distant memory. She expounded at length on this opinion, and with a little more than her usual acidity, a vein throbbing painfully in her forehead all the while.

"Well, we _did_ get a little carried away," the flock's appointed spokescrow admitted once Rei stopped swearing, looking as close to sheepish as it was possible to look while equipped with feathers and a beak. "But the fact remains that you must learn about your past."

"What? I haven't got time for this. I _have_ to get to school and learn about now!"

"That won't be necessary," said the crow, ruffling its feathers. "You're much too sick to go to school, or so they believe, after receiving a call 'from your grandfather.'"

It didn't occur to Rei to wonder how a bird, even one that could talk and, apparently, do impressions, could use a telephone. She was much more concerned with whether this was what it felt like to suffer a debilitating brain aneurysm. Fortunately for her, it wasn't, and she felt that the best course of action would be to go on shouting. "What's _really_ going on here?" she demanded, her eyelid beginning to twitch for the third time that morning. "What gives you the right to interfere in my life?"

"It is not our right, but it is hers. We are all bound in service to the spirit of Mars-that-was, and she says you must be warned. If not for yourself, then for the sake of your friends and the safety of your princess, you must not repeat the mistakes which she made."

That finally gave the bird the opening he needed. As much as she wanted to be rid of her uninvited guests and have an ordinary day with no Senshi business, Rei knew that she could not ignore whatever new threat was growing. And for all her protests, a small part of her was curious just for the sake of knowing. Of course, she wasn't about to even hint that her interest had been piqued. "Fine, then. Get to the point."

"The point is not mine to make. Mars and Venus fell here, at the end, on the spot where your shrine's gate stands today." Rei raised an eyebrow, even more curious than before. According to what she had been told, the Senshi were supposed to have been together on the moon, fighting against the forces of the darkened Earth. She started to say so, but the big crow cut her off. "She says that the crystal she made with her memories before she passed from the world is there, turned up by the roots of the old cherry tree beside it. You are to find it, place it in your fire, and meditate there. May the gods guide your arrows, Mars-that-is. I have served my purpose and can no longer speak." Indeed, the bird's voice was slowly turning back into an ordinary caw even as he finished his final sentence. He rose from his place and shot into the air. The entire flock of crows, rooks, and ravens all took wing together to follow him, completely blotting the light of the overcast day for a moment. They scattered across the sky, heading for their own colonies.

Phobos and Deimos returned to their perch on her shoulders, and both started to preen her hair, probably an attempt to soothe her temper and anxiety. It was something they did pretty often, come to think of it. Casting about for a shovel and finding none, she sighed, resigned to getting a little dirt under her nails more literally than usual.

It didn't actually take much effort to find what she was seeking, for her hands moved with a will of their own. The crystal was almost at the surface, caught in a layer of dry, loosely packed soil held by the gnarled roots. It was about the size of a bottlecap, brilliant scarlet, and warm to the touch. It felt... alive, somehow, and familiar. _So there is a grain of truth to it, at least. _

Rei looked warily into its surface, and her eyes caught a flash of yellow-orange fire within the stone.

_Time to go see what it is I'm supposed to see. If this is a trap, there will be ashes raining from the sky over half the world by the time I'm through venting._

She reentered the shrine, sliding the door shut behind her, and made for her meditation room with all haste. Placing the stone in the center of the fire amid the coals, she sat back on her mat, the crows dislodging themselves from her shoulders. The pair took up their places beside the flames, staring into them and appearing to meditate themselves. Once again, Rei quietly chanted through her words of power, and this time it was effortless to fall into her other consciousness.

At first there was a profound sense of nothing. But slowly, almost painfully so, a vision was beginning to form around her entranced eyes, and a voice spoke within her head. It was like her own, so much so as to be almost indistinguishable.

_**If you can hear me, then you and I are one and yet not the same. Do not let yourself be bound to the errors of our shared past. May the gods guide your arrows, as they did mine, and your heart, as they did not.**_

Once again, Rei found herself kneeling on a mat before a fire, but it was not in her temple. It wasn't any place she recognized at all.


	6. Holier Than Thou

To the readers I haven't scared off yet: Sorry this took so long. My life kinda fell apart for a while there. Incidentally, to see my version of Princess Mars in this fic (and a few of the others, but they aren't as finished), here's a link to my DeviantArt account.

I know, I'm not too good an artist, but it'll give an idea.

UpsideDownJupiter./art/Princess-Mars-with-background-83626471

Thanks.

Holier Than Thou: In which a few little sparks fly

Chastity. Piety. Service. As a very young child, the princess of Mars had determined to swear herself to this. That had been before she had known exactly what "chastity" was, but the way her mother had explained the facts of life to young Rei, while it hadn't actually damaged her impressionable mind forever, had made taking the holy orders sound like a very good idea.

_That and the damn prophecy always hanging over my head now. It seems you gods, to whom I have dedicated my life, are still the sort of people who would tell a little girl praying before her fire for the first time that if she ever finds love, it will be the end of all things! If you can also find it in your hearts to help me here, and help my people in my absence, then prove yourselves worthy of my offerings and do it._

When Rei had come of a certain age, and had begun to chase after attractive young ladies of the court, all noble aspirations and prophetic admonishments temporarily forgotten, her mother had taken her aside again, this time in obvious distress, talking about young women going through a phase of experimentation and how she had never done it herself, of course, but she understood as long as it did not get beyond flirtation under any circumstances. In what seemed a very odd non-sequitur to the relatively innocent girl, she had also warned her daughter that she should never look the Senshi of Venus directly in the eyes at any cost. She had then recovered her poise and declared that if Rei still wanted to take the vows, which would be very wise in light of her old revelation, now was the time.

The young princess had done so, with great ceremony, in the sight of all the people of her kingdom. Shortly afterwards, the still-unawakened soldier of fire had been sent to the moon, to learn under some of the harshest and most venerable masters Mars could offer, who had been counted among Queen Serenity's advisors since before Rei's birth and merely added her training to their duties. She had lived here for all the years since, in secrecy and relative seclusion, the princess of the Moon her only visitor save for servants.

Notoriously impatient and hot-blooded, Princess Rei would not have made a particularly good fit for the peaceful and contemplative Martian priesthood, nor would she have risen through its ranks as far as she had, if it hadn't quickly become apparent that her predictions were genuine, and that they continued to bless her. It was she who had known of the imminent fall of the bridge between her mother's palace and the rest of their great city and warned people off of it on the day that it had crashed into the lava-filled chasm. Most recently, she had foretold the coming of the mysterious plague that now raged across her planet. Even her mother had fallen ill a month ago, and the last she heard, Queen Mars did not have much hope of recovery. That was when Rei had felt the power over fire that had lain mostly dormant within her truly stir to life, and her mind had opened itself to the thoughts of others. In that moment she knew that the spirit of Mars had abandoned her mother, sapping her of its strength and promising her the same slow and wasting death that was already the cause of so much grief among the common folk. It cut her to the core to be, even indirectly, the cause of her mother's decline. Whatever her faults, Rei deeply loved her homeworld, its people, and especially her family, and would have given up a great deal to have stayed to care for all of them. But there was no forsaking her duty to Serenity, either. Without the peace kept by the Lunar monarchy, the Mercurians would have been unwilling to come out of their ivory towers, or whatever they lived in, to help Mars battle the disease, and the Venusians would have been on their commerce like bejeweled buzzards on a golden gut-wagon, all assuming, of course, that the Jovians hadn't decided to resume their raiding, or just kill everyone in a last "glorious" rampage through the solar system.

She rose carefully from her mat and let the flames in the brazier die down into embers, unable to put her heart into her prayers. She shooed away the two handmaids the Lunar Empress had thoughtfully assigned to care for her needs. They scurried obediently back to their own quarters. The last thing she needed was to hear the inane chatter of their inner monologues echoing in her brain, or to feel the ridiculous awe with which they still viewed her pressing down on her like a heavy blanket. She did not want to feel their eyes still wandering with curious revulsion over the pale ridges of ritual scarring that would tell any fellow Martian who she was and what she had accomplished just as if her arms, chest, and back were all covered with writing. It was a relief to be rid of the silly creatures. Rei needed a clear head to sleep, and she needed sleep to replenish herself.

Unfortunately, she was not precisely alone, as the princesses' wing of the palace was often a very busy place with a lot of people thinking a lot of thoughts. Most nights, she was able to shut them all out, but tonight, she was truly exhausted. She had spent the day fulfilling her vow of service, which, on the moon, seemed to consist of patching up the casualties in tavern brawls in Silver City's Jovian quarter while disguised as someone far less politically significant. Hardly worthwhile work for one who should have been at home trying to help cure a plague. The whole mess had culminated with her being clocked in the head by a thrown chair and nearly giving herself away as one of the Senshi by not falling over unconscious on the spot. Fortunately, the crowd, true to its ethnic background, had been more concerned with taking out its anger on the man who had thrown the chair at "Mayumi" than with making sure the quiet, unassuming healer was all right, and Rei escaped with an intact alias, a bump on her head, and an inclination to get far more drunk than the dignity of her office permitted before the evening was over. The trying incident had also left her vulnerable to anyone's stray thoughts, and it was a choice mix tonight, from the horrible pain and fear that someone was suffering upstairs to the a man having an incoherent nervous breakdown below. Someone was translating ancient poetry, Princess Serenity herself was ensconced in the central room of her tower, daydreaming about time she had spent on Earth, all were mixed up into a chaotic soup. The annoying Venusian children's song that was stuck in the head of one of the guards, and consequently, stuck in Rei's, was just icing on the whole dreadful cake.

Speaking of soup and cake, she hadn't taken any nourishment since... she couldn't remember when. She had forgotten to eat far too often for her liking since coming to this place. As she wolfed down the light meal her attendants had left for her, she tried to filter the input down to a more manageable level. Soon, she could there were only three "voices" left, and her own thoughts scattered among them. All of them seemed to come from above her, though in the dimension of thought, it was difficult to sense direction very well.

_What the hell do I know about taking care of someone?_ asked the first, with an unmistakable snarl. _I should have just put her out of her misery there in the alley instead. So why couldn't I bring myself to do it? I'm going soft. I need to get off the damn Moon._

_Well, so much for philosophizing,_ counterpointed the second mental utterance. _Hopefully I can get well and leave this place, and her, before I have to find any more of it._

_I know what you're up to, mother. Challenge accepted. I will bring her to heel, as you say. I'll do what you never managed to, and if you renege on your side of the bargain, I will take your head, and your precious crown with it. Now, my evening's entertainment ought to continue, I think... But it has slipped its leash, and where, oh, where, has it run away to? It really isn't nice to have..._

"Oh, gods, no..." Rei growled as thoughts of just how (she assumed) Princess Venus's "entertainment" might proceed invaded her, along with phantom versions of the accompanying sensations. _Too much. For all this training and for all this learned patience._ She ferociously bit her scar-bedecked arm, tasting bitter ash and smoke. Her mind slammed itself shut with a force that made her reel, though she wasn't sure how long it would hold. Furious nevertheless, she blew through the doors onto her balcony, reared back, and unleashed a torrent of white-hot fire, aiming it upward at what she thought was the source of the offending psychic impressions. It burned pleasantly through her throat and out of her mouth, charring the flowers in its path to flaky ash.

She followed it by shouting, in a very satisfying manner, "Would you people kindly shut up?!"

Somewhat relieved, she turned to go back inside, just as a real voice overhead roared, "Well, good evening to YOU, too, Mars!"

She looked over her shoulder in time to see a forked, pale yellow slash of lightning crack down toward the spot where she'd been standing. The thunderclap rattled her bones, and she figured the entire wing of the castle was awake now and staring frantically out the nearest window.

_Wait... Lightning... That means I'm really in cold water now._ "Jupiter, I presume?" she called up.

"Yeah, why? You wanna spar or something? It's been a weird day, I can't fucking sleep, and I'm pretty pissed off, so I warn you, I won't go easy."

"Er, I'll pass. I was just blowing off steam more than anything. Although, I'd appreciate it if everyone up there would think a little more quietly." There was a long pause, during which a few bruised pink rose petals drifted past on the way down to the ground. One of them caught a tiny air current and stuck itself to the end of Rei's nose. She itched it away in annoyance.

"Oh? How does that work?"

"Uh, actually, it takes years of study and practice, and much more self-discipline than you might think."

"Sorry, not gonna happen tonight."

"What was all that about?" Another woman had joined Rei's upstairs neighbor on the balcony.

"Just meeting one of my new neighbors," Jupiter replied. "You shouldn't be out here naked, you know."

"Well, all my clothes were destroyed when..." Here, the conversation became somewhat indistinct, and when Rei caught snatches of it, she rather wished she hadn't.

"...just wearing bandages. I threw that thing out, because..."

"I was covered in blood and..."

"...back to bed. Come on."

_Ack! I do not need to hear about this. And that miserable rain is starting again._

"Right. Good night, you two. Please, for the love of all the gods, don't do anything I wouldn't do. I've already had enough of that for one night!"

Rei went back inside, shucking her red-gold robe and laying it over a chair. There were a few minutes of blissful silence, during which she lay on her back on her bed and nearly drifted off.

_Ow. I think I really overdid it this time._

That wasn't her thought, damn it. Rei sat bolt upright. "Not again."

Someone was walking down the stairs toward her door with the halting step of someone either exhausted or grievously injured. They also seemed to be wearing metal high heels. Whoever it was paused for a short time outside of Rei's door, then turned, and headed back up the stairs.

Rei sighed quietly and allowed herself to crawl between the sheets and make use of the particularly fluffy pillow, closing her weary eyes without further ado. And the footsteps returned again and again, always limping and pacing, always pausing in front of her door.

There were a few more passes of those ringing, metallic steps before the long-expected knock. Grumbling, Rei threw on her dressing gown and went to the door, ready to rip several new holes of her own invention in whoever had decided to bother her. She forcefully yanked the carved stone portal open, glowering out into the corridor and immediately losing herself in a sky blue-tinted dream.

"What is it?" she asked, though it didn't come out as angrily as she had thought it would.

"I know you Martian priestesses can heal. Will you help me?"

Standing outside Rei's door was the most beautiful creature she could have imagined. The glowing, golden symbol on her forehead told her everything else she needed to know. She had just looked directly into Princess Venus's eyes.


	7. Mirror, Mirror, Off the Wall

Mirror, Mirror, Off the Wall: In which Minako is not wearing any pants

(And we're back in the present!)

"Mmm... Rei..."

Dawn's rosy fingers were creeping towards the snooze button of the great ringing alarm clock in the sky, and Minako Aino was missing it all. She was also perfectly happy with the situation.

_**Mi-na-ko... **_a soft, singsong voice imposed itself upon the intimate moment she had been enjoying.

"Mrrg... whaddayawant?" she grumbled, snorted, and went back to sawing logs almost immediately.

_**Minako.**_

"Huhhh... five more minutes!" Minako rolled over onto her stomach and fell asleep again. "Oh...yessss... Rei..."

_**Minako!**_

"Need... beauty rest. Yeah, thassit... beauty rest." She pulled her pillow over her head and held it there, making a defiant (and quite rude) gesture at the world in general.

_**MINAKO!! WAKE THE HELL UP!**_

"Ow! You didn't have to yell so loud, mom. I would've gotten up eventually. Hey, where are you? It sounded like you were standing right on my eardrum and screaming out your lungs."

_**I'm not your mother. I'm... well, I guess I'm Sailor Venus now. **_

"No, you've got that backwards. _I'm _Sailor Venus, and you're my _obnoxious _mo... No wait, I'm not Sailor Venus! I've, uh, never heard of Sailor Venus until just now! Wait, that's not right either... Tell you what. Go out and come in again; we'll try this from the top, only this time you leave me alone and let me sleep like it says in the script, all right?" There was a pause, which was filled by mysterious shuffling and scraping noises.

"All right, I've come in again. Now will you just listen to me?" said the voice, sounding much more substantial than it had before. Minako grudgingly removed the pillow from on top of her head and sat up, rubbing sleep out of her still-closed eyes. "You're worse than Princess Serenity was, and _that's _hard to do. Now, there's a lot I need to get off my chest, and you are going to hear me out."

Figuring sleep was an utterly lost cause at this point, Minako stood and opened her bleary eyes to the morning, finding herself unexpectedly alone in the room. "Let me get this straight," she grumbled. "You woke me up from a Rei dream to tell me that your breasts are too big, and now I can't even see you?"

The voice sighed in exasperation, but did not take the bait. "You really ought to look in the mirror," was all it said in response.

She padded over to her dresser and gave a cursory glance into her looking glass for a moment before beginning her daily search for her school uniform somewhere in the accumulated mess left by a particularly sloppy teenage dreamer. "Yeah, so? I just rolled off the bed! What do you expect, miracles?"

"No, silly! Look again."

She did as she was told, and saw that she already seemed to be in her Venus fuku. "Oh. I must've transformed in my sleep. That's funny... I didn't think I could... wait... what? YAAAH!!" The top of Minako's head connected with her low ceiling with a sickening thump. The reflection in the mirror had remained almost perfectly still throughout the whole incident, though one corner of her mouth twitched with amusement.

"All right," said Minako, getting up and dusting herself off. "For now, I might sort of be on my way to believing you. But you need to get invisible again; my mom's coming." And even as she said this, there was a rapping at her door. Mercifully, Sailor Venus disappeared from the mirror. "I'm up already, mother."

"I noticed. And thanks to you, so is all of Tokyo. What horrible thing happened to you that you have to scream like that? Did you lose your makeup or are you failing school again and just now realized it?"

"For your information, I just woke up from an awful nightmare! I thought you'd died!" _But then I found out that you hadn't. _

_**Hee hee... Good one, Minako-chan, **_said Venus' voice in her head again. _**I wish I'd said that to **_**my**_** mother just once, back in the day.**_

"I'm going to work now," her mother grumbled, stalking away down the hall.

"Okay, Venus, if that's who you really are; it's safe to come back in the mirror. I'll listen to what you have to say, but make it quick. I have things to do, and I'm not going to forgive you so easily for scaring the pants off me just now."

"You weren't wearing any pants."

"A minor detail. Now please explain yourself while I get dressed for school."

"You'll be missing school today, I'm afraid," said Venus, suddenly looking as if there was something very interesting on the back of her hand.

"What? After I get up this early? I don't think so. Ami promised to help me with my English composition assignment!" Minako was already tying the bow at the front of her blouse. "Time's up! Gotta go, bye!"

"It can wait, and it will. If your precious Rei finds what Mars left for her, you will need to know some things." Minako had started to scurry toward her door, ignoring her mirror. "You're staying right where you are, especially if I can actually do this without a body..."

There was a soft clinking sound. Minako turned to its source and watched in astonishment as a chain necklace lifted itself from the top of her dresser as if moved by invisible hands. It thickened and changed its shape, wrapping its golden links around her wrist and tightening, anchoring itself to her bedpost. "Now wait just a minute! I don't like where this is going at all! Well, maybe a little bit, but that's _not _the point! I have places to see, things to go, people to do!" she babbled. "And what's Mars got to do with all this?"

"What happened in the Lunar Age with myself and Princess Mars should not have happened." Another golden chain had crept around Minako's ankle, pulling tight.

"I should think not! You're acting like something from a horror movie, and I can't imagine a universe in which Rei didn't deserve far better!"

"True, too true," said Venus sorrowfully. "And we don't always get what we deserve. That's beside the point, though! If you weren't running away, I wouldn't have to secure you like this. Besides, don't you want to know the whole truth of the Silver Millennium? All the mistakes we made that led to our end? The origin of some small part of your hostility towards your mother? The tragic love story of yourself and the girl you keep dreaming about in such _interesting_ ways?"

"That '_interesting' _is not helping your case." Minako said, continuing her struggle as the chain wound round her other ankle. "You're a youma! A perverted youma! And when I call Sailor Moon, you'll wish you'd stayed in your own dimension!"

"Rubbish," snapped Venus, seriously fed up. Minako felt herself being wrapped up in a metallic cocoon like the prey of a golden robot spider or something along those lines. "If I were a perverted youma, would I have tied your legs together so tightly?"

"I suppose not, but very little you've done so far makes me believe that you're my real past self, either."

"There is nothing I can do to convince you if Artemis isn't around, but I will give you our story anyway. I warn you, some of the things I did casually, just to pass the time, you will probably find abhorrent and near-unthinkable. You will most likely be shocked and appalled."

"Yeah, but having met you, at least I won't be _surprised,"_ Minako grunted as the cocoon of chains reached her waist.

"Ouch. I guess I deserved that, though. Just remember that it was very different from Earth." Suddenly, all of the metal fell away from Minako's body, reverting to its original form with a sound like shattering glass. Venus swore viciously, and her image began to fade from the mirror. "Used too much blasted energy," she explained unnecessarily. "Look, I'm just going to knock you out and give you some dreams while I go replenish myself. It's for our own good."

A second later, Minako was lying, still fully dressed, on her bed. She was surrounded by half of the contents of her jewelry chest, but other than that, she looked like she was taking a peaceful pre-class catnap. The scene she had become a part of in her mind, however, was anything but peaceful.


	8. Queen's Pawn Opening

Queen's Pawn Opening: In which Venus makes a move

Hideously beautiful. Wonderfully messed-up. And, of course, obscenely rich. It was, apparently, a good thing to be a Venusian royal in these prosperous days, or, come to think of it, ever since Princess Minako's people had divined what they thought to be the purest truth of human nature and sat back to rest on their laurels.

After much deliberation, the Venusian thinkers had decided that every person, be they from Mercury, Pluto, or anywhere in between, was at heart a beast. As such, their basest desires were the motivation for all action until completely fulfilled. No rational decision was possible when the slightest bit of greed or lust remained unsatisfied, and so it fell to those who wanted for nothing to lead them with absolute power. The problem with absolute power is well known now, of course, but that idea came too late for the rulers of Venus, as did the realization that the lower appetites can and will grow without limit given the opportunity.

There was a great bustle of slaves around her, some playing music or dancing for their mistress, others preparing delicacies from across the kingdoms and all of it turning her chambers into a whirlwind of activity. She had nearly whatever she wanted, and what she did not have, she was surely capable of buying. What was not to like?

There_ was _something that she did not like at all, actually, deep down in her slightly tipsy brain. But Minako ignored its nagging, knowing it was easier to perpetuate the system, to enjoy its benefits, and to keep the commoners dumb and complacent, harshly putting them down whenever they got too smart, than it would be to tear it all up and start over again. Especially if you were already riding high at the top.

_Almost at the top, anyway. Mother certainly has made it obvious what I am for as far as she is concerned. _Minako glanced down. For two years she had borne the punishment of a deserter, with heavy golden shoes nailed into the bones of her feet and ankle, the bolts driven between the tendons, for refusing her dear mother's orders, and had worn them since. At least they were stylish. The queen's remaining power, though it was slowly being drained by her daughter as the spirit of Venus abandoned her, kept her from using the energy she already held to warp the metal away from her feet and free herself. The queen's message was clear: _Remember that the one who gives you gold can just as easily give you steel. Remember and obey._

She had learned to live with most of the pain. But walking became unbearable after too long and running was out of the question. Fighting, what little she did of it, was difficult, but her strength lay in destroying foes with their own emotions and desires rather than weapons to begin with.

"My lady?"

"What is it, Artemis?"

The cat-man was regarding her, as he occasionally did, with barely concealed distaste for her habits. He had been her companion almost from birth, assigned as such by Queen Serenity as a favor to her mother. He had served Minako as a tutor in the ways and languages of the kingdoms, as well as a curiosity to show off to those who came to see her, very few of whom had ever encountered the strange catfolk who lived alongside Lunar royalty. He bore it all silently and with the great dignity common to his kind, but it was sometimes obvious what he thought of "his lady" without him saying anything, and that he did not share Serenity's largely _laissez-faire_ attitude toward the other kingdoms, which allowed her to keep them all away from her throat as well as each others. She suspected him especially when her slaves kept mysteriously disappearing during her moments of distraction, but she was no more free, politically speaking, to send him away than he was to leave her employ. His ears were struggling not to plaster themselves against his skull and his white tail swished slowly from side to side as he made his reply. "Her majesty requires your attention again. Also, Princess Jupiter sends her assurances that you will be disturbed by no further screaming, at least for tonight."

_Killed another one, has she? Wow, she goes through 'em just like they say. Speaking of which..._

Minako looked down with annoyance at the collared youth who had been attempting to attend to certain of her needs and placed the sharp high heel of her shoe against his breastbone, giving him a brutal shove which toppled him backwards from her golden couch. "Get out. Your techniques bore me." She snapped her elegantly manicured fingers, and he was removed. The musicians stopped mid-phrase as she held out her hand to receive the small mirror, in which the queen's image appeared, from Artemis' silver-sheathed claws. "Yes?" she said into it, "I was in the middle of something."

"Oh, already breaking in the new bed, are we?" chuckled the face in the mirror. "I'm sure you can take a minute to listen to your poor old mother, no?"

"That depends. What does my poor old sarcastic mother want with me this time?"

"A favor for a favor, as always."

"What favor for what favor?"

"It's hardly even a fair deal, since there's so much potential for you to enjoy this."

"You always say that. Skip the games and tell me what you want." She snatched a silver fork and stabbed one last spiced sweetbread, chewing rather insolently on a mouthful while waiting for the reply.

"Mars."

"Oh, yes, I'll just go pick up a whole planet with my supernatural strength and hand it to you. Would you like that with polar icecaps or without?"

"You know what I mean. Through our influence, my dear child, we essentially own Earth, Mercury, even the Moon thanks to Serenity's old infatuation with me. You are in a rather unique position to give us another silent conquest, if you will, as the Martian Senshi is trapped where you are, and you will be working closely with her. Bring her to heel for me, and her planet will fall at my feet."

"And what will you give me for her?"

"If you succeed, I will release my magic from your bindings, and I know you would love to be able to dance and to run again, if only... away." Her laugh was like the tinkle of poisonous little bells. "I may even officially make you my heir and give you the crown off my head so you can control the little empire we are building ourselves."

_To be free... To become queen... Promising. _"And if I refuse...?"

"I could always use another one of those ornamental columns and the potential reversion of all your energy to me. And if you try and still fail, I might consider giving you a hole to breathe through, of course, but you would not live very long on just air."

_Much less promising. _"Very well. Method?"

"Any method that _you_ like." Her mother was hinting at something, and Minako knew exactly what it was. She wanted the Martian princess seduced, shamed before her people and her gods, and broken utterly. This was clearly no ordinary assignment, it had to be an old score that needed settling. She was fairly certain of which, too, though nobody had ever told her.

_Challenge accepted. I will bring her to heel, as you say. I'll do what you never managed to, and if you renege on your side of the bargain, I will _take_ your head, and your precious crown with it. _

Minako failed to see exactly how her success with Rei of Mars would be much of a balm for old wounds to the pride, but if it meant her release from her punishment, not to mention securing the throne, she would do whatever it took. Of course, she mused, lodging one of her Love-Me Chain's bladed ends between her mother's smug, conniving ribs would be equally satisfying. But she was not on Venus, and even if she were, there was a delicate balance to be maintained. "I know just what you're fishing for. Consider it done," she said to the mirror with a toothy smile.

"I'll consider it done when I can read about it. You should count yourself lucky I didn't send you after Jupiter; you know the fate of all her consorts."

Her mother's image disappeared and was replaced by her own reflection, and Artemis secreted the magic mirror away in a pocket of his saffron tunic.

"Thank you, Artemis. You may go." He went, and gladly, judging by the way his ears perked up.

_Now, my evening's entertainment ought to continue, I think... _Minako snapped her fingers again, and the dead music was vibrantly reborn. That was not exactly what she had wanted, but no matter. Casting about for the dancing girl of whose singular talents she had planned to avail herself, she found her missing. She was on her much-abused feet in an instant. "Damn you, Artemis..."

_It really isn't nice to have to wait. Not nice at all. _The search she directed turned up neither hide nor hair of the girl within her chambers, and she seethed with increasing anger thinking of the property that had been lost to her and the enjoyment she would have derived from it.

As unusual as it was for her to leave her quarters alone, tonight she did, roaming the halls of the princesses' wing. Clearly the other were blind if they At first, she went in search of both Artemis and her missing slave, and found neither. What she did find, however, was that her feet felt like they were on fire. This was not exactly surprising, but she still cursed her foolishness in trying to pursue the stray herself, and was not entirely sure what possessed her to keep walking and ignore the pain. A minute and a flight of stairs later, she found herself outside a stone door marked with the symbol of Mars. _A stroke of luck, this. Unless I'm mistaken my assignment lies within. _

_She's probably asleep. That might get us off on the wrong... foot. Ow. I wouldn't want that._

Minako kept walking, passing Mercury's chambers next. From within, she heard a muffled but obviously heated argument, and regretted that Mercurian was a language she could read well enough, and write, albeit with atrocious grammar, but speech and understanding still eluded her. _Something of little consequence, I'm sure, but I can't help being curious._

Up the other flight of stairs she went, pausing at her own door too. _Now that I'm up and about, I am restless. I can't bear the thought of going back in there any more than I can outpace one of those giant falcons the Uranians ride._

Jupiter's quarters were eerily silent, and she could not suppress her shudder at living just across the tower from such a person. She passed the door as quickly as her pain would allow.

Serenity's rooms, ensconced in the center of her guardians', were silent as well, but the effect was not at all eerie. She found herself back downstairs in front of the Martian princess' door before she knew it. She made a longer pause there this time.

_All right, Minako. You can do this. All you have to do is hold her eyes with yours for a moment, and she'll submit like any other, chaste priestess or no. _

She had to make a few more rounds of the tower before her courage was fully in place. By this time, the nerves in the area were yelling at her as if they were trying to get her attention from across a crowded city square. _I suppose a little medical attention would be in order, wouldn't it? And it gives me a reason to be down here. She won't suspect a thing, unless her mind-shielding techniques are hopelessly flawed..._

She put up a hand to knock, and it was clear, by the way the door flew open, a gust of hot air from within nearly knocking her over, that she had been expected. Well, she hadn't exactly been stealthy clanking around like that.

"What is it?"

"I know you Martian priestesses can heal. Will you help me?"

Mars's eyes were pretty captivating themselves, she thought, as she found that their gazes had locked. The deep violet orbs seemed to spark and smolder with a secret flame, inviting her to burn in them, sending a very different message than the crossed arms and the wisp of smoke that curled up from her mouth. Disconcertingly, though, it was _she _who had more difficulty pulling her eyes away. When she did, it was only to take in the white scars that covered Rei's dusky skin. More disconcertingly, she had to resist the urge to run her finger over one serpentine mark that extended along the back of her arm from the sharp protrusion of her wrist bone to the coil it made at the apex of her shoulder, all revealed by her robe's split sleeve.

"When you're through ogling me, I will help you, but only because you are not my enemy, and it would be against my oaths to refuse."

_Uh-oh. Well, at least I'm not an enemy._ Minako did not blush, but only because she never did anymore. "My apologies. I had heard several tales about you, but I was not well-prepared for your..."

"Save it. Sit here and I'll tend to your feet."

_Double uh-oh... _"How...?"

"You'd be surprised how much I know about the goings-on within these walls tonight. I'll tell you that it's more than I ever _wanted_ to. Besides, you're currently both limping _and_ bleeding. Sit."

Minako took her seat on the uncomfortable stone bench Rei had indicated, watching her as she went to a flat wooden chest in the corner of her anteroom and pulled a white cloth aside from its contents, bending down to dig for her supplies. "And... uh... what do you know of me?" she probed cautiously.

"You and your mother are like two golden pythons entwining, strangling the life from each other. She has set you a task which she herself never managed to accomplish, seeking to gain from either your failure or your success, and you know this. You wish to distract yourself from your plight, and the fact that your high place no longer satisfies you and the finest feast turns to ashes in your mouth... A favorite slave of yours has disappeared this evening. And... you are currently admiring my buttocks with more interest than is proper."

_Damn it!_ "Sorry. It won't happ..."

"Yes, it will." Rei's distaste was dripping from her voice. She was on the floor beside her now, laying hands on her feet through their metal prisons. "Hmm... Not entirely lost..." Minako felt a strange tingling sensation as the hands left her momentarily and began to deftly apply something with an earthy, herbal smell to the edges of her shoes and around the heads of the spikes that held them in place. The pain was much less afterwards, but she swore the affected flesh was literally crawling. Her discomfort must have been apparent, because it drew a chuckle from the Martian.

"That's just the feeling of your wounds closing much faster than you're used to. In a few minutes, you will be free to return to your den of iniquity."

Rei avoided her eyes for the rest of that few minutes, and responded to her attempts at conversation with either monosyllables or stony silence. She no longer showed any of the signs of being enchanted by Minako's power, only wariness of it. _I _had_ her! How did she throw it off so easily?_

She recalled something her mother had said when she was younger and just beginning to draw the Spirit of Venus away. _Your eyes will ensnare anyone except one you truly desire. _Her mind reeled. _This is going to be much more difficult than I had planned for. But all the sweeter for the difficulty. That is, if I didn't..._

"Good night, Venus," said Rei in a low voice, half-leading, half-dragging her obviously unwanted guest to the door and shutting it firmly behind her, interrupting her thoughts before they got any further.

"Good night, Mars," she whispered to the unheeding door. On the way back up the stairs toward her own quarters (and with so little pain she scarcely felt it at all!), she thought doggedly about her duty to protect Serenity, her anticipation and apprehension about the next day's meeting, Artemis, Mercurians, the awful weather... Anything but Princess Rei of Mars.


	9. Dressed to Kill

_This chapter still sucks, I'm afraid. No matter how I wrote Makoto, she kept reminding me of a cross between Gaara and Neji from Naruto, which is a rather scary thought. Parts of it seem to require the visual of question marks dancing around someone's head, but suggestions are very welcome, as are all reviews except flames. Also, a large part of it, through a misadventure I won't bore you with the details of, ended up getting translated into Greek (badly, at that!) and back again, which is a small part of the reason it's so late. _

_But I'm not dead!_

_To the person who said I should also post this as a Rei/Minako story, is that even allowed?_

Dressed to Kill: In which honesty is (possibly) the best policy, and Nephrite does not actually appear

Makoto had not slept at all, though dawn was rapidly approaching. The storm had made two further returns during the night, and the rain and wind had lashed the walls of the palace more fiercely each time. Alas, it had failed to drown out the footsteps of some fool who had decided it would be a good idea to prowl around the tower in metal high heels in the middle of the night, and who seemed to be badly injured. Through it all, Makoto had remained on her balcony, sprawled across the marble and staring up at the swirling heavens while getting soaked to the skin. That is, when she wasn't peering through the windows to make sure that Ami, who had nearly passed out after running outside during the incident with Mars, was still alive and mostly in one piece.

_If I had just managed to stay here like this earlier, I wouldn't have some strange girl in my bed, complicating my life._

She told herself she wouldn't have felt rested anyway.

Mercury had managed to make a nest out of the sheets Jupiter, however, thought she observed the signs of alertness in her fellow Senshi; even at rest, she seemed poised to bolt at the first sign of anything that felt like a direct threat.

_Of course she's going to try and run from you, idiot! Who wouldn't? That shouldn't bother you. Savor her fear like you would anyone else's. _

With a sigh, she opened the door and reentered her white marble prison. Apparently, she'd been wrong. Ami remained quite definitely asleep while affecting the posture of a mere catnap.

_Right, scratch the whole savoring her fear thing and go to plan B, which is... to let her sleep, I guess. _

So many things depended on Ami's story that it was difficult for the Jovian not to rouse her charge and demand answers right then and there. That, she told herself, was why she had felt so pulled to take the girl under her protection. _This smacks of Fate. If her own people had held her captive, that means they were probably trying to hide her from Serenity. Or... My father's advisors saw signs of weakness in their hold on the planet, I know. If she's really not the princess... then it seems their family line has been abandoned, and that would hurl them into chaos, not at all unlike ourselves. And if she's lying, that presents another problem entirely..._

Instead of shaking her awake, Makoto sat down on the edge of the bed next to her fellow Senshi. Ami rolled over onto one side with a muffled groan, but still did not open her eyes, or indeed give any further sign of life. _Still asleep... Poor, weakened thing... _

_And if the Mercurians _were_ really trying to lie to our glorious leader, and were exposed... and by a Jovian, no less... we might receive better consideration in future. That, or this mess could blow up and shatter the whole so-called alliance. The Lunar Empire might end, and peace with it, and good riddance! They have sent us no help when we asked, done so little to improve our lot that I can't recall a single instance in my lifetime! And when Serenity falters, old hostilities will flare up again, and surely another planet will have it in mind to attack us. A common enemy would give me the momentum I need to reunite my planet. Of course, what's left of my family... they won't hear of it. So they will be dealt with. Once we've repelled the inevitable invasion, we will launch our well-justified counterattack. This time, though, we shall not merely raid and retreat. Under my rule, my people will conquer and hold that other world, whichever it may be... And with the new resources, still more will fall, until my domain stretches unbroken from Mercury to Pluto._

"And when we set our sights on star systems beyond this one, we will be unstoppable! The skies of their planets will rain slaughter upon them until they either submit to me willingly or fall before our superior force. Mercury is already fallen into my hands, thanks to Fate, with the information that could make or break Serenity's rule and it all depends on how I choose to use it. They say that in all her incarnations, she has been a brilliant tactician, too. Maybe that is why I have her now. I wonder if she will join me and lend that fabled mind of hers to the task."

"It's pointless being afraid of you; either you'll do something horrible to me or you won't, so umm..." the small voice was issuing from Ami's place in the bed, "I very well might lend you my mind. Just for the record, I would prefer not to have any more horrible things done to me, though."

"What? That was out loud? How much did you hear?" Makoto didn't have to be able to see her own face to know that her embarrassment was written there in the boldest strokes nature could provide.

"You've got quite the maniacal laugh, you know," Ami replied without really answering, both eyes still focused on the princess' own in a way that made her most uncomfortable. Apparently she was serious about not being afraid. To Makoto's surprise, it was kind of refreshing, once she discounted the bizarre need to squirm under the Mercurian's unabashed gaze.

"I guess I got a little carried away. I hope you're well-rested at least, because you're going to explain yourself this morning."

"I know. Although most of my earlier life is not really worth talking about. But just out of curiosity, what do want my help with?"

"Don't ask," Makoto gritted out, still mightily embarrassed. "You really don't want to know."

"Oh...?" Ami then settled back against the pillow once more, almost daring a suggestive smirk. "I think you can tell me. Honestly, I owe you my life twice over; If they hadn't gone through the laws and purged the really archaic stuff last year, you'd essentially own me. And whatever crazy thing you're after, I'm sure it can't be stranger than some of the requests I got back on Mercury.

_As long as she heard me, I might as well go ahead and ask her. After all, what is she going to do to me? Unless she's been lying, herself. Even if she has, I can easily overpower her if it comes to that... I just wonder what requests she got back on Mercury. _"What? People have asked you to help them, um, conquer the galaxy?"

"Nope, that's a new one on me. So, assuming for the time being that it's not an obscure Jovian euphemism for something I _have _been asked to do, I am genuinely intrigued, to use an eminently appropriate word."

_Oh. She... oh..._ "Never mind that! Now, tell me what happened to you! How, exactly, did I manage to save you _twice?"_

"You _were_ responsible for all the bolts of lightning being flung about last night, weren't you? One of them restarted my heart." Appearing to sense Makoto's confusion, she held up a hand. "It's complicated. And technical. And all sorts of other things that would bore you to death, possibly _my _death,so..."

"So give me the how and why of everything else before you begin to try my patience," Jupiter finished her sentence for her.

Ami seemed to consider the array of weapons decorating the walls once more before speaking again. "By the time it became clear what I was, I knew enough to hide it. A lowborn Senshi will not be recognized. Not on Mercury. It would not do for someone of no bloodline to inherit control over the planet. But any disguise can slip, and word got out to the royals that 'their daughter' had been spotted in a part of the city that no self-respecting princess would even pass through by carriage. Somehow, that scandal was shut up without the general population finding out that Mercury had, for all appearances, abandoned the ruling family, but the hunt was on for me anyway. A month ago, the King's Guard caught me and handed me over to the finest of our scientists for experimentation. From what I've been able to piece together, they were trying to extract whatever it is that sets a Senshi apart and give it to its allegedly rightful owner. It would be a very logical, and really stupid, thing to do."

"I wonder why they didn't just kill you."

"They wanted more control of the process. And apparently, killing me would have been unnecessarily cruel." The snort with which she punctuated this statement told Makoto exactly what she thought of _that _sentiment. Oddly enough, they had found something else to agree on. An unbecoming bitterness that had hitherto remained beneath the surface now broke through into Ami's voice. "All my life, I have been a forgiving soul. But when they started taking their frustrations out on me as well as doing their job, all the words about unnecessary suffering became... rather hollow."

"That's just warped." _She confirms some of what I thought, and adds new information. But the question remains of how to begin using it. _"What do you suppose they will do now that they've lost you?"

"Try to find whoever the new Senshi is, I'd imagine, unless they know I survived, in which case, they'll come looking for me. If they recall Sayori home, it will raise questions to which there are no answers, so the deception will likely continue until my powers awaken and I can expose it."

Makoto allowed a savage sort of grin to take hold of her face. "Why wait?"

"I think you can understand that now isn't the time for that sort of thing. I'd like to be strong enough to take my own revenge."

"That, I can certainly understand."

The rest of the day passed largely in the sort of comfortable silence that comes between two people of few words who have already come to a common point. Ami drifted in and out of sleep and Makoto, after practicing forms with a few of her more esoteric weapons, stared meditatively into the most recent of the long string of thunderstorms thrashing the garden she had started thinking of as _hers_. Rose petals scattered themselves everywhere in the face of the driving rain, looking themselves like pale pink drops, and flowers of yellow jasmine trailed behind them. From all the shouts below, it sounded as if the palace's lowest floor was having some difficulty sustaining the amount of water with which the sky had suddenly decided to bless them.

It was only natural that at the moment Makoto realized she was already late for the first meeting with the other Senshi, lightning struck so near the castle that she could feel its power racing through her nerves.

"Son of a bitch, I'm going to look like an idiot!" she shouted, rushing back inside. She stripped off her ordinary clothes, cursing all the while with no heed to the fact that she still had company, and began to arm herself. First, she bound her breasts tightly against her chest. As much of a pain as that was, it would not do for any self respecting warrior to get in her own way. A tunic of padded leather and chain was next, and then the solid steel breastplate. To honor the importance of the occasion, however it would turn out, she selected the most ornate of her armors, wrought with roses and snarling dragons. Shoulder guards, gauntlets and greaves all bore the motif, complete with intimidating (although irritatingly gold-plated) spikes. The winged helmet was the last touch, gleaming splendidly from its recent polishing.

She chose her armaments carefully, not wanting to appear too much like she was intending to bring down an army single-handedly over the course of the evening. Her favored battleaxe came with her of course. As she took it in hand, it sprang to life with sparks that did not die down until a few seconds after she had strapped it across her back, crushing the folds of her emerald cloak somewhat. After a moment's thought, she belted on a short, curved sword and tied a band of throwing knives around her left wrist.

_What is it that I'm forgetting? _She stared herself down in the mirror until Ami looked up with an upraised eyebrow and said, "I thought you were worried about getting there on time. Trust me, you look... Well, let's just say that nobody will be able to take their eyes off you long enough to conduct their business."

"Flatterer..."Makoto slammed the wing-patterned visor over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed, just in case their green glow was not enough to neutralize the redness that had crept up her cheeks. _What the hell is wrong with me? _Without another word, she rushed from the room, bending her steps towards Serenity's enormous throne room, neither looking nor caring much what was in her path. Charging in full armor, it would have taken far more force to stop her than was worth expending for their sake.

"I say! What's your hurry, sir?" some of the knocked-over obstacles called after her. Others were considerably less polite. Still others just went _crash! _being inanimate and, in some cases, fragile objects. One in particular went _splash, _the significance of which was lost on Makoto at the moment.

She flung the grand double doors wide with an unintentional yet reverberating bang to reveal a sight that made her shudder in embarrassed horror. This was not a meeting like any she'd ever been to. Not only were there hundreds of people crowded into the huge, pillared hall, but most of them were dancing in pairs to the music of a quartet of odd stringed instruments that seemed to be made of oversized scallop shells. All of them were wearing the sort of impractical courtly finery that Makoto scoffed at the thought of even owning, let alone actually putting on. And while the band was determinedly playing on after the shocking interruption, all conversation between those who were not dancing had died. It was then that she looked down at herself, and found that she had somehow been drenched with blood-red wine, which, in the light of a thousand flickering candles, looked very much like the real article.

_That just figures._

A small cough from behind her caused her to look over her shoulder as an unsure-sounding voice announced the unexpected arrival of Lord Nephrite, General of the Earth Kingdom.

_Wait... what? _

She whipped her head around again as a merry tinkle of laughter rippled around the room. There was nobody behind her. Nobody next to her either. It was time for one of those split-second decisions. It seemed that it might be best to be someone else at this point, clean off her armor and remove her helmet off in a corner, and correct everyone when she was presentable once more, or at least as close to presentable in a place like this as she was willing to get.

Alas, this was a much more difficult proposition than it had originally appeared, due to her first direct encounter with the Lunar press. It went better than the indirect encounters, probably because she kept her mouth shut, but it still delayed her, annoyed her, made her want to swat the lot of them like insects.

"Excuse me, my lord, could I get a brief statement on the conflict in..."

"Is that what they're wearing on Earth now? Our readership will eat this up, I swear."

"Is there any truth to the rumors surrounding Lord Kunzite's affair with..."

"General, is any of that blood yours?"

_They actually believe I am this man... Who the hell is he to steal my family's armor?_

She firmly waved the fluttering cloud of journalists away and retreated to the end of the hall opposite the doors, slipping into a shadowed corner alongside what she soon realized was Queen Serenity's dais, and began to clean off her wine-splattered armor. She braced herself against the marble wall.

"Luna, I will hear no more of you spouting this nonsense!" Makoto froze halfway through swabbing a particularly bothersome red stream, which caused one of the dragons on her breastplate to look as though it was bleeding profusely from the eyes. The voice, coming from behind the wall she leaned against, was one of authority, but behind it was a profound exhaustion that could only come from trying to hold together ten vastly different planets.

"As one of your advisors, 'spouting this nonsense,' as you've so kindly put it, is part of my duty. I know the mother was a fine companion for you, but she's been dead for years, and my sources tell me that her daughter is little more than a rabid animal, too dangerous to be allowed to survive, be entrusted with the safety of the princess! That entire..."

Makoto's sudden, violent sneeze drowned out whatever was said next, but clearly this "Luna" woman had raised her voice to the supreme ruler of the solar system. _That's odd._

"If nothing else will silence you, think of how it will appear to the other planets, never knowing who will be next under the axe!"

"Never a turn of phrase more apt..."

"Don't interrupt me. I refuse to hold onto my power by means of fear, simply on principle. Now, do go and make sure my little rabbit doesn't fall out the window again, and for the love of all that is holy, keep her out of the wine! We don't want a repeat of the, er... horseback riding incident."

"Please, Majesty, rule them, rather than letting them rule you. I shall leave you with that."

"And I shall ignore it as the meaningless drivel it is. You are wiser in other things, and it would behoove you to stick to them."

A cat-woman with iridescent black fur was obviously shooed into the room through a hidden door. She seemed to cast about for something, and when she found it, slipped in among the crowd of people with ease. Makoto, after hastily ridding herself of the rest of the mess, followed after her.

"There he is!" someone squealed in an impossibly girlish way. "He's bringing news from my Endymion, I'm sure of it!"

"Princess, control yourself!" She recognized the voice of Mars from the previous night, and followed it to find a scarred young woman in splendid red and gold robes holding back what, by her hairstyle and the sheer number of pearls that bedecked her gown, could only have been Serenity the Younger. She approached the struggling pair, deciding that even if she looked like the comic relief of the entire evening, at least she wasn't the only one.

"Oh, Rei! You're always so mean to me!"

"Well, I do keep you from making a fool of yourself roughly ten percent of the time. Besides, that's not Lord Nephrite."

"I'm almost certain that's not even a man!" another voice purred. The woman who was its most obvious source seemed to lounge even while standing up. The symbol carved into the amber pendant she wore, along with the fact that her 'dress' consisted of golden a few golden chains wound around her body and leaving next to nothing to the imagination, marked her as Princess Minako of Venus. She crossed the distance to Makoto, wincing occasionally and making it clear that she was the same wearer of metal high heels from the previous night. "You're not a man, are you darling?" She leveled a high powered wink at Jupiter, one which she barely managed to dodge. "I could check, if you've forgotten under all that armor..."

"Sayori, Minako, help!" Serenity wailed. "She's using her Martian death-grip!"

"If I must," said someone who would quite obviously rather be anywhere else. An ice-blue gown came into view, along with the largest amount of hair that Makoto had ever seen, done up in two thick, blue-black braids that trailed on the ground behind the Mercurian princess, covered in gaudy silver charms. Minako followed her example and helped pull Rei off, leaving Makoto alone to reestablish her personal space.

A resounding slap heralded Minako's reemergence from behind their princess, clutching the left side of her face and looking very put out. She hauled the Martian away behind a column and both disappeared from Makoto's sight completely. She decided if there ever was a time to show her face in the midst of this mess, it would be now, and raised the visor of her helmet before pulling it off completely. "Your highness," she said simply.

Princess Serenity of the Moon Kingdom, heir to the reins of ten entire worlds and supposedly the brightest hope for the future of this alliance and/or empire, very delicately fainted.


	10. Thought Police

_Many thanks to Nerdberserker for being a most excellent beta and forcing me not to make a complete hash of this chapter. I hope she'll continue to put up with me as I attempt to see this little project through. It would also help if I knew that anyone besides her was still reading it. Not that I'm hinting at anything, of course._

_Here we will have the Rei and Minako chapters before the Ami chapter in this cycle because it just works better this way. Please don't be confused. I'll shut up now and turn things over to Mars._

Thought Police: In which not-so-gentlemanly priestesses do NOT prefer blondes, dammit!

"We need to talk, Mars. You know—like civilized people do."

"I have nothing to say to you," Rei sighed, turning her back on the one who had replaced the Moon Princess as the most infuriating and captivating person in her life. However, as she tried to walk away she found that one of her trailing sleeves was threatening to tear off in Minako's surprisingly strong grip. "Actually, Ihave two things to say to you," she corrected herself in harsh tones. "The first being that you'd do well to keep your filthy hands off of me if you can't stop staring; the second being that if you've suddenly become civilized, I didn't notice." She yanked her sleeve out of the other girl's grasp with enough force that Minako stumbled slightly forward.

"Now you're just being unreasonable! You and I are one wing of Serenity's guards! We're supposed to work together closely from now until we outlive our usefulness, wither away, and are, quite understandably, cast aside!" Quiet clinking and jingling alerted Rei to the fact that Minako had thrown down at least one of the smaller chains that made up her alleged outfit in a gesture doubtlessly intended to add force to her words. Any effect this might have had was nullified by the fact that her target was definitely not looking.

"If you think making an even more disgraceful display of yourself going to get my attention, you're only deceiving yourself. Make your point and leave me in peace."

"My point is that if you're going to haul off and hit me every time I happen to lay a finger on you, it's going to be a damn long assignment, even if one of us keels over by next week!"

"You didn't 'happen to lay a finger on me;' you pawed all over my breasts. On Mars, there's a distinct difference."

"On Venus, people wouldn't look twice at a Greek horse."

_That made absolutely no sense._

"Earth expression," Minako added, as if it explained everything. "All that aside, the Princess ordered me to pull you off her, and so I did."

_Oh, gods, she's staring at my... _"I told you it would happen again."

"_You're_ the one that turned your back to me, you know."

"No more of this foolishness." As disturbed as she was that the Venusian had remembered exactly what she'd said last night so readily, she would not spare Minako another glance. No, she would not, even if it damn well killed her... but she could still feel those dangerous eyes widen with feigned innocence, and even feigned innocence was attractive on such a face. "I am a servant of the gods and above such things."

Although she would sooner die than admit it, the fact that the extraordinarily beautiful woman had chosen to dress so sparingly was not helping Rei's cause, either. She started to walk away once more, and this time it was her embroidered golden sash that was caught.

"Hey, according to some, _I_ am a goddess!"

"The goddess of driving me up the wall, are you?"

"Love, actually, though I can see how_ you _might confuse the two."

"I said stop trying to play games with me; I'm not biting!"

"_I _could, if that's what you like. All kidding aside, I know better than to play games where my duties are concerned."

"Which? Those to Serenity, or to your mother?"

"I take neither lightly." A minute shudder had run through the Venusian princess' voice, but one that Rei could not miss.

_Fear? A sudden draft? Something more unsavory?_

She cracked open her mental shield just a little, reaching out a tendril of awareness and finding Venus' emotional center with ease, as it was one of the most tumultuous in the room. _If I can feel this clearly and with this much control, then obviously I should be well-rested more often._ The shudder had indeed been fear. It seemed a little strange to her that Minako would be afraid right now when she had seemed so carefree and annoyingly flippant seconds ago, all because her mother's assignment had been mentioned. Whomever the task concerned, and whatever its nature actually was, the stakes were obviously high.

"...seriously as you do your own. Mars? Rei? Rei?"

She abruptly returned to herself at the sound of her name. "Did you have something you wanted to tell me?" she asked coldly, still not turning around.

"I was only saying that I can be just as serious as you are and that my loyalty to the alliance is beyond question."

"That's so, is it?" Rei heard an exasperated noise behind her this time. It seemed that Minako had finally reached her own breaking point. She had to suppress the satisfaction that made her feel; it was unseemly.

"Look, could you at least pretend that we get along decently? Part of the point of this evening is a display of unity among the princess' guard."

"Hn."

"You could start by looking at me when I'm talking to you. You know, as if I were a person?"

"Hn." Rei was not falling for that one; oh, hell no! Not after last night.

"Oh, for heaven's sake! It's perfectly safe... for you, anyway."

"Ah, of_ course_ it is." She could see that damnable wink without even looking, but she wasn't going to fall for _that_ one either. "I mean, hn."

"Well, if you won't even turn around, how, exactly, are you going to dance with me? It's tradition that battle partners share the last dance before dinner, you know."

_Oh, now she's just lying. That does it! _Rei turned on her heel, robe swirling about her like a menacing cloud.

"See, that wasn't so hard was it?" Minako cooed at her. "Didn't I tell you I get what I want?"

"You might have mentioned it once or twice. I think I can get you excused from any more dancing, too," Rei muttered, drawing in a deep breath. "It seems like you just might want that." Her... partner's... expression was priceless, even if she refused to look at her eyes. She silently promised her divine benefactors that she would take a day of fasting to atone for what she was about to do.

"Hey, wait, what do you think you're..." It was too late for that particular question, and it really should have been obvious anyway. Mars exhaled a stream of flames at the floor where Venus was standing in her metal shoes. It wasn't her hottest fire, but it was certainly enough, she prayed, to make a clear statement. "Ah! Ow! Oo! Hot metal! Yow! Oo! Ack! I'm making you heal this later, you know!" Minako cried, doing a futile little dance right where she stood as her permanent footwear heated up. "Or maybe I'll just make you regret it!"

"But it was worth it."

She watched Minako walk away with an even more pronounced limp than usual, and then stepped out from behind the pillar. That had felt too damn good. It was time to return to Serenity.

The princess in question was still busy trying to charm Jupiter's spiked greaves off with her childlike sweetness, and from Makoto's look, it was working as much as that kind of ability could work on a slightly bloodstained, glowing-eyed wall of armor. Or perhaps she was just being as close to polite as a slightly bloodstained... well, you get the idea. At least she had curbed some of her battlefield language for the preservation of the Princess' delicate sensibilities.

"That's utterly absurd!" Jupiter roared, in what Rei sincerely hoped was the same open, good-natured exasperation that Serenity the Younger seemed to elicit from just about everyone. "Where do you people get your information? Bathed in blood is (mostly) just a figure of speech! And besides, that was only once! Well, all right, a lot, but still..."

"Well, I'm glad you're on my side!" Serenity took an involuntary step back, a little bit of fear evident on her face as well. "Uh, you are still on my side, right?"

By contrast, the only thing that could be discerned by looking at Sayori was that she was crossing the edge from tipsy into drunk, polishing off the last of what was at the very least her fourth glass of wine.

_So, besides the most promising budding alcoholic of the evening, who is this girl?_

Curiosity and anger being chief among the few passions in which she allowed herself to indulge, she reached out in a more concerted way toward the ever-reticent Mercurian. Apparently, people kept stepping on her hair, and the fine white nectar of the grape was the only thing she was enjoying about her time here at all. Something else was there too; it prickled at the edges of Rei's perception. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up a little, and she was just about to probe further when she experienced the psychic equivalent of ramming headfirst into a two-foot-thick wall of reinforced steel and bouncing off it.

_All right, Rei, think. That didn't feel evil... but I don't care what it wasn't. I need to know what the frozen hell it actually _was_._

She got her answer when something brushed against her left side. Alas, she had company.

"That was appallingly rude. Don't they teach telepathic etiquette on Mars?"

When she turned to face the source of the voice, she was pretty much blindsided by a lot of bare, bronzed skin. Apparently, at least one of the so-called Outer Senshi was in attendance this evening.

How anybody could manage to look so elegant and so wild at the same time was beyond Rei. The impatience and offense in the woman's blue-green eyes, however, was not. This was not someone to trifle with, and this read loud and clear despite the fact that her evening apparel seemed to consist of a few strings of pearls and a long, sheer skirt which pooled like water around her feet.

"It appears that you lack finesse as well as manners. That's dangerous in tense times like these. Now that you're being officially installed guarding the Princess, Queen Serenity has made it a part of my assignment to help you gain some small measure of those skills. It's a good thing I caught you before your crude intrusions were detected and caused an interplanetary incident. I am Michiru of Neptune."

"I can see that," said Rei, rather sourly. She did not add aloud that she could see quite a bit more of "that" than was considered decent in her culture, or that her headache was approaching the intensity of an interplanetary incident by itself, but assumed that her fellow psychic got the gist.

"I suppose I was rather short with you myself," Michiru sighed, upon getting it. "My apologies. But please do us all a favor and hold off any more prying until I've seen exactly what you're capable of. I've set aside some time in the evening, three days from now. I'll find you."

_As if we both didn't have enough to do. Isn't Neptune supposed to be patrolling the outer rim?_

She had slipped away with a clatter of pearls and coral beads before Rei could even formulate a verbal reply, of course, though her thoughts moved a hundred miles a minute as usual. The mercy of it, she supposed, was that all signs of Minako's existence had been thrust right out of her mind.

_Oops. Damn it. _Rei scanned the crowds and could not see her chief annoyance anywhere. _Oh, well. Why should I care what rock she crawled under? She's just a random pervert, and it's only through the most rotten luck that I have to tolerate her presence._

"Did _what? _With a _what_ sort of animal?!" Jupiter's incredulous voice startled her back to herself yet again. "Absolutely _not,_ and there have been quite enough questions for one night, I think! By your leave, I will go and... er... mingle, now."

_So much for Serenity's delicate sensibilities, _Rei thought, making a mental note never to ask what that outburst had been about, and to tell the rather awestruck Moon Princess exactly how lucky she was to still have a functional neck. She sighed, blowing a smoke-ring as much out of habit as anything, and made her weary way back toward that particular knot of people. Here she was, stuck on the damn Moon with an obnoxious distraction, a living weapon who happened to be a complete mental case if any of the reports were to be believed, and some kind of mysterious drunk, and all of them tasked to protect a princess who hadn't enough common sense to make it easy. And now _this._


	11. If the Shoe Fits

Thanks so much for the sudden outpouring of responses! It's been very reassuring.

If The Shoe Fits: In which Artemis proves himself to be a straight man

Minako had not, in fact, crawled under a rock. Instead, she had parked herself on a decorative but somewhat uncomfortable bench from which she could keep an eye out for Princess Serenity's whereabouts while summoning her long-suffering feline companion. As soon as he appeared, bearing the golden chains she had so theatrically cast aside during her impassioned speech to Rei, she began to complain to him.

"Oh, Artemis!" she began, adding a long, quavering sigh for more effect. "I have had the most trying time this evening." He discreetly busied himself at reattaching the chains to the main body of his princess' outfit; she supposed this was intended to buy time before he had to reply.

"May I assume from the range of your facial expressions that you have once again encountered a certain priestess?"

"You assume quite rightly! And she had the immortal gall to perpetrate a violent assault on my person!" expostulated Venus. She snapped her fingers to attract the attention of one of her slaves, who had been hovering at the edge of the room all evening, and with a look, she forced the meek young woman to kneel in front of her so that she could put her feet up on something more to her liking than stone.

"Indeed, my lady?" She had to admit that Artemis was doing a fine job of looking surprised, although he had said in a rare moment of candor the previous night that he would not be.

"I ask you, who in the Kingdoms does she think she is to breathe fire at me? My feet feel like they've been spit-roasted and pan-seared! If she were going to eat me, she needn't have put me through all that first!I'm sure I taste fine without it!"

Artemis cleared his throat emphatically.

Minako thought briefly of the last time he'd been plagued with hairballs.

"To give it an educated guess, my lady, she supposes herself to be the princess and Guardian Senshi of Mars."

"In my great mercy, I will ignore the tone of that remark. I have never set eyes on such a fascinating creature, and I will have her if it's the last dragon-fucked thing I do! And you _will_ assist me." The cat-man brought forth an iced tumbler of Saturn's finest before his mistress could even ask him to go and get one.

_Whatever his foibles, he can certainly read me, _she thought, snatching it from him with a delighted exclamation and downing the liquor in one gulp. _I suppose he's not so bad a servant._

"That was meant for _me,"_ he said, with the barest trace of reproach.

The significance of this statement was lost on Minako, as she was busy following up her performance by extemporizing about how the drink reminded her so much of the desired object, both in that it was rather easy on the eyes and in that it gave her quite a fiery kick on the way down.

"But honestly, Artemis! She turned her back on me and wouldn't even observe the simple social niceties!"

"It appears to me that an apology is in order, my lady." He had managed to procure himself another glass while she'd been engaged in her sigh, and was now lapping at the surface of the amber liquid within in a perfectly genteel fashion.

"You're damned right an apology is in order, and you can bet your hairy tail I'm going to get one!"

Artemis coughed politely, as if to suggest that she had missed part of his point.

Minako pointedly missed his polite cough, and things went on in the same vein.

She noticed that his fur had begun to bristle again by the time she'd entered the third reiteration of her last conversation with Mars, and she was reasonably certain he was about to snap and say that given a choice in the matter, he would sooner play servant to Rei and her temper than to his current employer and her whining. However, Luna happened to pass by them at that very moment with a brief nod to him. He hastily made his excuses and trotted after the queen's exalted advisor, oddly enough, like a puppy.

She had to laugh at that. Even though she was only partially in command of the power of Venus, the insight it granted made it mere child's play for her to see through his attempts to plaster on a businesslike manner.

_You put up such a brave front, Artemis. But in your heart of hearts, are you not just as much a low animal as I am? More importantly, isn't Rei? _

She watched as the mistress of fire emerged from her seclusion, approached young Serenity and stayed close to her, the pair seeming to have a friendly difference of opinion which culminated in the two simultaneously turning their backs on each other with noses in the air, and just as quickly turning around again, laughing.

She tore her eyes away with an odd bitterness and found Makoto, who was rather difficult to miss even under normal circumstances, having the sort of conversation with Sayori that can only be had by two people naturally disinclined to converse, one of whom would visibly rather be making steaks and chops of everyone in her vicinity and the other of whom is drunk enough not to notice this vital fact. While Minako was looking on, someone had the bright idea of coming up from behind the Jovian and rapping on her right espalier as if it were a door that might be opened. She whirled with a glare at whomever it was (Minako couldn't rightly see, given Makoto's sheer size), and then laughed and gave him or her a hearty slap on the back which sent bystanders scurrying for cover. The princess of Mercury, no doubt sobered by the display, sidled away from the scene as quickly as possible, heading once more for the nearest supplier of white wine.

She hadn't sidled halfway to her target before a gong rang out and a hush fell over the whole assembly. Even then, she continued her progress, albeit at a much more subtle pace. Venus once more redirected her gaze, this time turning to face the far end of the great hall, where a flurry of activity had broken out. It appeared that the legendary Queen Serenity was at last making her entrance.

Minako was not really listening to the address she made to the court, being rather taken with the great ruler herself. It wasn't that she had never seen her before; the Venusian palace had received her on several occasions. However, those had all been relatively informal meetings between old friends on the surface, none of them had been recent, and this was the first time Minako had been in her presence when she had the full power-and-majesty business running. Whatever her memories, the hundreds of candles that had previously lit the room were rendered dark by what seemed like the concentrated brightness of a million stars, and in the midst of this stood what could only be described as radiance made flesh and given wings.

How she could possibly be related to that silly girl, who had just tripped over her own feet, per the norm, was a mystery of the highest order. Rei deftly caught the falling klutz in her arms before she became more of a danger to herself and others than usual, and Minako found herself scowling again. Jealousy was not an entirely new feeling, but in most of the times she had felt it before, it had been possible for her to take steps to end it quickly. Now, though, it ate at her insides unchecked by its own irrationality, she couldn't even distract herself by trying to get on Artemis' last nerve. She was just thinking that life was becoming terribly unfairwhen she received a bony elbow in the ribs, surely the last straw. Upon a split second's reflection, she decided to call it the last brick, and then just as quickly decided that the last boulder of epic proportions would be more appropriate. The outcome was the same, but it just sounded better in her head.

"Watch where you're going, fool!" she hissed, raising her hand to claw her attacker across the face before the sight of a ridiculous hairdo caused her to refrain from causing a political incident.

"Sorry," mumbled Sayori. "It's just that she wants us up there."

Minako looked back at the dais to see that Serenity had indeed extended a beckoning hand. She stood up, but now that the adrenaline rush was gone she found herself stumbling on her badly burnt and hobbled feet. She reeled, bumped into the Mercurian, and became entangled in a stray braid. One thing led to another, meaning that she fell flat on her face and was hauled upright by the one responsible for this misfortune in the first place, receiving a blast of potently alcoholic breath in the process. They looked quite the sorry pair as they made their clumsy way forward, leaning rather heavily on one another, and the whispering that followed in their wake was truly nasty.

Through worsening pain, she vaguely heard the words the queen bestowed upon her daughter's guardians, probably a compelling speech about how living in a darkening age under threat of perils yet unknown made it imperative that they put aside their differences, or lay down long-held prejudices. The fate of ten kingdoms, rather than just one, rested in their hands.

_What is she going on about? Maybe it was teamwork. I think she might have mentioned food, too, or selfishness being discouraged. I hope this feast's as good as mother said it was in her day. I feel like I haven't eaten since lunch._

"I think I'm going to..." Sayori quavered, teetering dangerously and not only distracting Minako from her pondering but nearly pulling her off her feet again.

"No, you are not!" Venus hissed, wincing as a nail ground harshly into her bone as it strove to hold her shoe in place. "And if you do, and it gets on me, I will cause part of my dress to rise up and strangle you. Now keep your mouth shut!"

It seemed she was not the only one having problems with the situation, as proved by the Jovian accent that arose from her other side. "I _really_ hope I'm not smelling roasted feet right now."

"Ah, that would probably be my fault. Sorry about that, Makoto," replied Rei.

Minako missed most of the spectacle of the tables seeming to appear from thin air in the midst of the revelers. She was much more concerned with whether or not this was what it felt like to suffer a debilitating brain aneurysm.


	12. An Infestation of Bookworms

_An Infestation of Bookworms: In which a genius decides on a no-brainer _

It was well past the time when Ami should have figured out what to do and started doing it.

After Makoto had left her, she had tried to get back to sleep, the obvious choice for swiftest recuperation. She would have been successful had it not been for the perverse tendency of the mind to become considerably more active when its owner would rather it simply go away. Thus, no matter which way she looked at her situation, it just wasn't conducive to rest and relaxation.

Ami felt as if the unseen hand of destiny was holding her where she lay, and she did not like unseen hands. They tended to do people no good under the best of circumstances, and for one lying wounded amid the nest of vipers that, according to those in the position to know, was Queen Serenity's court, they could be positively disastrous.

_I owe her my life and she's promised to protect me. I'm stuck here, feeling this illogical sense of obligation, enough to have felt compelled to tell her more truth than I've ever told anybody, without receiving nearly as much verifiable information in return. If I were the idiot protagonist in some story written to amuse simple-minded children, then maybe I would just believe that her promise counted for something. _

_If there's one thing I'm not, it's an idiot. _

_So, why can't I move? _

With a great burst of willpower, she hauled herself to her feet, stood beside the bed and leaned against one of the posts for support. At this point, she was heartened by the revelation that her legs were able to hold her up without assistance, unlike the previous night.

She looked down at herself and promptly sagged back onto the bed. Her current state of dress was one that would certainly raise eyebrows. Even in a city like the Lunar capital, where she'd heard that one could easily spy someone clad head-to-toe in splendid black and white furs casually conversing with another who had eschewed ordinary clothing in favor of a personal waterfall, rarely would anybody venture forth while dressed only in coarse, bloodstained linen bandages, discounting the rumor that her host had done so in at least one instance.

Of course, she spotted the solution to _that _problem immediately. The voluminous cloak Makoto had worn the previous night still hung on a hook close to the door. It was splattered with mud and carried the scent of blood and seared air and earth, but it would definitely cover her and might even keep the rain off when she left the shelter of the palace. _If _she left.

_I cannot let myself become entangled in politics, _she thought, trying to dissuade herself from the dangerous course laid by her primary line of thought.

_Ah, but who really said anything about politics? _retorted the part of her mind that wanted nothing more than to stay here.

_Just what did I agree to help her with, then? It sounded like she wanted me to be one of the masterminds behind some insane military campaign against an alliance of all the other planets, assumed to be the largest consolidation of power in history. I see three problems already. First, it's insane and definitely contains political elements! Second, the words 'largest consolidation of power in history' would be enough to dissuade a thinking person such as myself from participating in any kind of direct attack. Third, what the hell do I know about strategy and tactics? _

At this point, a few pieces of random but relevant information popped into her head_. _This didn't really surprise her; random information tended to do that, and had done as long as she could remember. The most spectacular occurrence was the one where she had suddenly _known _how to read, despite having been barred from learning by accident of birth. At the time, she had been unaware of the power that claimed her as its heir, and so had been more than a little rattled by the experience. The ensuing rash of thefts from private libraries in Mercury's capital city, however, proved beyond a doubt that she knew exactly what to do with such an opportunity, as well as being something of a sensation at the time. The choice she faced now was much less clear-cut.

_All right, brain. I've read a few books about it. I've read a few books on the Senshi of Mars, too, but that doesn't mean I sleep on hot coals in the winter or that I can spew fire out of my mouth, or anyplace else, for that matter. I will only disappoint, and even if I'm not really so afraid of her, disappointing her probably hacks a fair chunk off the old lifespan, literally. _

For some reason, she _still_ half-wanted to stay, if only to learn more about this supposedly cruel, evil maniac of a woman who had been nothing but kind to her, not to mention being... fascinating in an extremely irrational way. The prudent choice would be to leave, hide out somewhere in the Lunar capital, and never be heard from again. She would disguise herself as she had done before, and steal or find a decent way to earn a living. She would deal with the full awakening of Mercury's spirit, if and when it ever happened, in complete secrecy, and more than anything else, she would stay the hell out of anything that looked remotely like the halls of power. However, far from being cowed by reason, her rebellious curiosity only grew stronger, leaving her mind just as much in combat with itself as before.

She rose again, peering around for something, anything, that could sway her one way or the other. There _were _those skulls hanging over the fireplace, but looking at them now did not give her nearly the fright that it had before. A peek into the small kitchen revealed only a fine set of cooking utensils, the mingled smell of herbs and spices that made her sneeze, and an ice-chest full of meat which was not from humans, as evidenced by the still-attached hides. Nothing, in short, that would convince her either way.

_See? Nothing out of the ordinary. Stay. You know you want to figure her out. _

_Are you crazy? Get out of here before she decides to do something horrible to you. _

The vast collection of weapons still gleamed at her from the walls with imagined malevolence, though, and it was there that she now brought her search for something that would break the deadlock, giving her inquisitive nature free reign at last.

Her fingers skimmed over the cold stone wall as she paced along it. She stopped to stare for a moment at a coiled whip, its length pierced at intervals with jagged chips of obsidian, and again at a twisted and blackened spear that seemed, upon closer examination, and even after a quick treatment of skepticism, to fade lazily in and out of existence. Certainly both were strange and exotic, and doubtlessly unpleasant to catch the wrong end of, but even that didn't seem to resolve the issue.

The next piece that drew her attention was a sword with a curved blade that seemed to have had a few bites taken out of the edge. After a few seconds, she realized why it had caught her eye. The design was definitely Mercurian, and probably made more for show than for effectiveness in battle. It was certainly ornate enough to have belonged to someone who thought a lot of himself, someone who would probably not have stooped to confronting his foe directly.

"Why would she have a thing like this?" Ami wondered aloud, putting out a curious hand to grasp the golden hilt.

_And suddenly, that hand was dripping with dark blood as if she had sunk up to her elbows in one of the corpses that littered the snowy ground around her in varying states of dismemberment. She could feel it congealing in the bitter air like a viscous glove, yet more was running off the edge of the weapon she now held. _

_A feeble tugging at her cloak made her turn around to face a small boy, who looked up at her with wide and questioning eyes. Without a thought, she brought the blade down hard, where it lodged in the child's still-soft skull. _

_"Mother, was that really necessary?" someone spoke immediately to her left. "Even if we're working for the greater good, wasn't that a bit inappropriate?" _

_"It all depends on how you look at it. We can afford no witnesses, and that," she nudged the tiny body with her boot, "might have come to remember this day. Besides," she continued, now with a faint smile, "this way it won't suffer the pain of growing up without its parents." She could feel her vocal cords working, but the voice that issued from her now was not her own. "Burn the place. Make sure these get well-charred. When we get home we'll receive the news of this atrocity and pin it squarely on Mars. There is nothing like a few massacred innocents to stir up hearts and minds to rebellion, am I right?" _

_Before she received an answer, the scenery shifted around her. When the world resolidified, she was at the head of a small company of soldiers on the march across a cold and desolate plain. All was quiet, but she could not shake the uneasy feeling that permeated the air around her. Something in it prickled at the back of her neck like a tiny current of... electricity? _

_The sky filled with angry black clouds, and rain came down in sheets almost immediately. Lightning arced menacingly toward the dry grass, and a peal of mad laughter rent through the thunder's rumbling. It was echoed by what must have been a hundred inarticulate battle cries that could only have come from above them, and her worst fears were confirmed when the voices were joined by the bloodthirsty roars of what had to be dragons. _

_Down they dove in a loose formation, their riders flattening themselves against the scaly necks of their mounts for the descent, roughly a hundred Jovian warriors bearing down upon them, eyes alight with that peculiar luminescence that, to anyone who knew the tales, promised misery and destruction to those below. _

_"Crossbows, ready!" Ami heard herself shout. The clicking and snapping as the bolts were loaded blended into a comforting sound. "Fire at will!" she cried, and watched the volley her men let loose. Leathery wings were pierced by shaft upon shaft, and several riders were brought crashing to earth. The lead dragon was still streaking toward her much too fast; all she could do was to roll aside to avoid the snapping jaws that would have been her end. Her forgotten banner lay in the mud, and one of the dragon's talons quickly slashed the snarling visage of the white wolf to ribbons. Water condensed and froze around the blade of her sword, forming itself into a perfect edge as she sliced upward with it, aiming between the armored plates of the dragon's chest. Blood mingled with the ice once more as the beast let out an agonized shriek and thrashed wildly against the numbingly cold metal puncturing its lung. She yanked it free and sprang nimbly to her feet, only to find that the rider had gone missing from her saddle. _

_It was as if a breath of chill wind had passed by her face; then there was a crunch and a jarring sensation in her arm, and the blade flew out of her nerveless, broken fingers to bury itself point down in the sodden field. _

_"Your kind weren't built for this. There can only be one end here. I'll have that sword of yours mounted on my wall before the day is out." _

_Blazing green eyes glared contemptuously down at her from a face that was contorted with both rage and glee, eyes that fixed her to the spot more readily than any javelin. Almost casually, the other Senshi, for surely no one else had such strength, raised her gauntleted fist to the sky, and Ami felt herself blasted backwards, nearly torn apart by a searing bolt of lightning that flew from the other's triumphant hand. Then, there was only the paralysis rolling over her body and a wordless noise rushing in her ears that might merely have been her own anguished death-cry, a primal reaction produced by the futile firing of a last few fried nerves. _

She barely caught herself in time to stop from cracking her head against the stone floor of Makoto's room. She felt dizzy and sick, almost as much as she had the one time she had ever drawn blood herself. The disgusting, slimy feeling as she had cut out the tongue of a man who had threatened to expose her identity was still a prominent feature in her nightmares.

"Who the hell just leaves something like _that_ out in the open?" she grumbled. There were of course, those Mercurian aristocrats who once in a while laid all their treasures in the street, guarded only by such tricks and traps as they could devise, cursed illusions such as the one laid on that sword among them, just to see how many greedy opportunists they might ensnare. It seemed awfully contrary to what she knew of Makoto's rather forthright, not to say blunt, nature.

_Then again, you don't _really _know, do you? She could be deceiving you, just as you thought you could trick her. _There was that nasty little voice in her mind again. She had to find some way to remove that thing as soon as possible.

She looked at the sword with a shudder of revulsion again; there was no way she would stay here now. Drawing Makoto's green cloak around herself, she put her ear against the heavy door and was immediately thankful that she had.

"All quiet here," someone muttered outside. "Again."

"Same upstairs," was the reply. "Not fair to give us patrol duty when there's such a feast on, eh?"

"I'm bored half to death."

Two sets of armored footsteps diverged and faded away into nothing as the guards continued their rounds. Ami slipped into the corridor, keeping herself as much to the shadows as she could. Unfortunately, she remembered little of the way in, and definitely not enough to determine the way out, and she kept having to duck into doors to dodge more patrols and the occasional gaggle of gossiping servants, so progress was slow. One such door near the end of the passage afforded her the opportunity to listen in to that gossip, however, and what she heard made her brows knit.

"I heard one of the_ Shitennou _of Earth showed up, but that can't be right!"

"It _is _right! Lord Nephrite just marched into the ball wearing armor, with a big axe strapped across his back."

"Funny, I thought he was more the type for a big sword!"

"Oh, _you...!" _

_Well, it sounds as if Jupiter _did_ make an impression, _she thought. If she hadn't been so bent on leaving, perhaps the comical nature of the situation would have affected her more. However, the last thing she wanted to do now was laugh.

She looked up, suddenly aware that this room was lit differently than any in which she had found herself so far. The flickering of flame was absent, replaced with steady lamps fueled by some unknown power source. Of course, that was not what mattered. The place was lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves, all of them overflowing with rare, exotic or even just interesting texts. As she gazed upon the treasure trove of ages on the moon, she forgot everything else; the plan to leave here was abandoned as quickly as it had been formed. Here, there were anthologies of poetry from all over the solar system with annotated translations by eminent scholars, books on the history and culture of any planet one would care to name, the manuscripts of many great philosophers, primers in languages long dead but not yet forgotten, and even a couple of orchestral scores. That, of course, was only what she saw in her first glance.

She selected a volume at random from a shelf full of histories, opened it, and found that it was titled "The Decline and Fall of the Martian Empire." Her reading revealed it to be mostly well-researched and quite engaging, and some person or persons unknown had scrawled untidy notes in the margin that suggested further texts to which she might refer, ranging from one of the least-known opera libretti in this particular library to the collected mad ravings of someone known as the Obsidian Oracle, who, to Ami's annoyance, appeared to have spoken only in rhyming couplets while predicting numerous historical events.

She quite lost track of time reading, looking things up, and listening to the few conversations she could hear outside the library door. Apparently "Mercury" was drinking enough to kill a horse, Venus was making a spectacle of herself, Uranus and Neptune had both been spotted unexpectedly, and "Nephrite" was having an unusually long conversation with young Serenity. However, the next thing she heard, what might well have been hours later, was that "Nephrite" was headed straight for the library, looking absolutely murderous, froze her blood. She gathered up several of the books she had taken down and rushed back towards Jupiter's quarters.

_I can't leave here until I've read everything in that place, _she decided, _not when they just leave a collection that would have prided even the haughtiest of the Mercurian elite, valuable beyond anything her young mind had ever imagined, completely unguarded. _

Somebody shoved her roughly aside as she rounded a curve in the hallway, and the stack of books she was carrying fell to the floor. All she caught was a brief impression of red hair and ornate, gilded armor before the inconsiderate brute had passed her. Whoever it was muttered, "You'd think she'd send someone less important on such a trivial errand. Retrieving some nonsensical fake prophecies for whatever whim has crossed her mind this time, forsooth! I did not sign on to be her majesty's personal fetch-and-carry man," and so on all the way down the passage. She gathered up what she had dropped, silently thanking whichever deity was looking out for her at the moment, and hurried on. When he must have reached where she had come from, a bellow of "What? The stinking thing's not even _here? _This is an insult and nothing else!" made her hurry even faster.

_So it wasn't Makoto after all, but I can't go back to the library with _him _charging around in there. _

The suite was still unoccupied when she reached the Princess's tower at last. She hung the stained cloak by the door, stashed most of her ill-gotten spoils under the bed, and returned eagerly to reading a chapter titled "The Ruthless Self-Liberation of Mercury," which held forth on the theory that deception had been involved and that Martians had not committed as many of the atrocities that caused the Mercurians to rise up and overthrow their control of the planet as was generally believed. The cursed sword still hung in its place on the wall, but in her book-lust the theoretical written account of the events she had witnessed in its illusion throughly counteracted her previous, very real, terror.

In fact, she was rather sleepy, and ended up drifting off quickly, her face pressed into the pages. She dreamed about dragons and siege machinery, flaming arrows and lying politicians, all in a very surreal world of floating stairs and spiraling corridors, to be awakened a few minutes later by the sound of a voice she did not recognize, just outside the door yet again.

"What's the matter with you?" it asked, in a tone that for some obscure reason reminded Ami of the sort of breeze that has a habit of throwing respectable ladies' skirts up over their heads.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Uranus!" With that, the reason was no longer obscure. What else could one expect from the soldier of wind and sky?

"You've been singing! And you didn't pick a single fight the entire evening! I ask again, what's the matter with you?"

"Should I pick one now?"

"Not unless you want to be humiliated! You know I'd just run circles around you."

"Oh, yes, you just keep on running. That way I only have to put my foot out to defeat you. I won't kill you, of course, because I consider you a friend, but if you like, I'll give you the kind of scar you can show your nonexistent grandchildren someday."

"Gods, I hate you sometimes. So, can I come in?"

"No."

"I still think you've been drugged. I'd better come in to make sure you're really all right."

_"No._ I've taken care of myself as long as I can remember; I don't think one more night without your company will finish me off."

"Those are famous last words, you know."

Ami was laughing in spite of herself. What did Uranus think she was playing at?

"You always do this! Why don't you go flirt with Neptune instead of trying to chop down a tree with a hammer here?"

"Fine, I'll do that!" said Uranus. "She knows a good thing when she sees it, unlike certain people who shall remain nameless."

"Good _night, _Haruka!"

The door chose that moment to fly open with a bang that rattled Ami's teeth and made the book slide down onto her chest. As quickly as she could, she shut it and thrust it under the top sheet. Makoto strode in, seemingly indifferent to her presence as she untangled her disheveled hair from the various weapons she was carrying, and started putting them away. When she finally did spare her guest a look, it was just a careless glance, which suddenly transitioned to a rather intense stare as she appeared to notice that something was amiss. She was beside the bed in a flash, pulling the sheet away with one hand and snatching the book from its hastily contrived hiding-place with the other.

"How the hell did you get this? You left, didn't you?"


	13. The Soldier of Missing Socks

The Soldier of Missing Socks: In which Makoto loses her edge and gets the point... sort of.

As far as Makoto was concerned, the evening had left much to be desired.

She had been seated at the high table with the queen, the princess, and the other guardians, but none of them had been anything like good company. On one side of her sat Princess Serenity, chattering away with her mouth full and asking her numerous embarrassing questions about methods of torture as though this would put the Jovian more at ease. On her other side was Sayori, who swayed in her chair and thwacked Makoto with a heavy braid every time her head moved, stuttering drunkenly all the while. Obviously, the idiot had never had a _real _drink in her life, and she had put away enough wine thus far tonight that _anybody_ would have ended up in her deplorable condition.

Across from them, Minako was undressing Rei with her eyes and not bothering to hide it, while the Martian princess steadfastly ignored her and everyone else, her feelings betrayed only by the occasional twitch. She even seemed to be ignoring the food in front of her, not that it was worth paying any attention. Makoto sorely missed the strong flavors of home, the offerings of the Lunar palace kitchens being as bland as most of the decor. The only meat seemed to be that of tiny roasted birds spitted three to a skewer, and there weren't enough of the things available to constitute a proper meal.

Add to that having been consistently mistaken for a man right up until Queen Serenity had called the guardians forward, and the night was one to be endured rather than enjoyed. It was bad enough showing up at such a function in the same dress as someone else, but to show up in the same suit of armor? Apparently, that was next to unthinkable in a place like this.

_At least Haruka's here at the palace for the time being, and that's good for a laugh, a fight and another laugh... and speak of the devil, she's tracked me down to my lair. _

The last time they had met, she had stood about a head taller than Makoto and had sported waist-length yellow hair that seemed to be stirred by its own little breeze. Now, the two were roughly equal in height, and Uranus wore her hair in a boyish style, but the pale blue eyes had been unmistakable, as had been that challenging smirk with which she had always greeted her before. That smirk triggered a flood of memories when Jupiter turned around to find her friend leaning lightly against the wall as if she had been standing there all along.

"What's the matter with you?" Haruka asked.

The Uranian princess only employed that sort of voice when she was up to something. And when Haruka was up to something, it was usually fairly clear what that something could be.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Uranus!"

So began their usual game; Makoto never admitted to knowing what Haruka was talking about, even when it was deafeningly obvious. The latter gracefully detached herself from the wall and fell into step beside the former, resting a hand upon the hilt of her ever-present scimitar while the other hand occupied itself with wild and expansive gesturing.

"You've been singing! And you didn't pick a single fight the entire evening! I ask again, what's the matter with you?"

_Wait... she's serious? And that was out loud? I can't deal with this right now._

Unfortunately, anything that might be the matter with her could easily be blamed on the small-scale disaster that had masqueraded as the first full meeting of this generation of guardians, and to say so to anyone would probably be politically unwise at the moment.

"Should I pick one now?" she ventured, grinning and reaching back to loosen the huge axe in hopes of shoving their interchange back into its customary track.

"Not unless you want to be humiliated! You know I'd just run circles around you." A faint, sharp scrape of steel against steel told Makoto that her companion's sword had been slipped ever so slightly from its scabbard.

_Ah, that's much more like it._

When Uranus started boasting about her quickness in battle, it was usually a reliable indication that a relatively friendly challenge was forthcoming. For some reason, that knowledge didn't help, if Makoto was going to be honest with herself, and that really struck her as odd. She had always genuinely enjoyed their bantering before, since it was not easy for her to get close to most people, who held her in awe or fear more than anything else. Haruka had never, in her entire life, felt inspired to either by anyone. This turned her mind back to what awaited her in her room momentarily, and then she realized that she was being watched with distinct expectation.

It was now Makoto's turn.

"Oh, yes, you just keep on running. That way I only have to put my foot out to defeat you. I won't kill you, of course, because I consider you a friend, but if you like, I'll give you the kind of scar you can show your nonexistent grandchildren someday."

"Gods, I hate you sometimes." Haruka drew her blade just a little further from its sheath, and Makoto reflexively grabbed the wrist of Haruka's sword arm in an iron grip, only to find in the next instant that she'd been spun around and that now the Uranian was standing between her and her door, smirking again.

"So, can I come in?"

"No."

Her mind clearly elsewhere, Makoto unconsciously released her grip on Haruka and took another step toward the door, only to find that the hand she had so thoughtlessly freed now lay nonchalantly on the handle of her door, as relaxed as if it truly belonged there.

"I still think you've been drugged. I'd better come in to make sure you're really all right."

_"No._ I've taken care of myself as long as I can remember; I don't think one more night without your company will finish me off."

With an exasperated growl, Makoto threw a punch at her counterpart's shoulder. Haruka swiftly ducked under it and the smaller spikes on the gauntlet penetrated the thick, wooden door in lieu of the intended target, leaving three splintery holes when she pulled them free. At least she was now back in position to enter her rooms.

"Those are famous last words, you know."

Makoto had to smile at a line like that, of course, but only did so briefly, as Haruka had maneuvered behind her and was using her axe's handle in a doomed attempt to force her off balance. Instead of changing tactics, though, she kept on rhythmically levering it in different directions, with the likely intent of annoying her. After a few more futile jerks, Makoto took the bait and whirled around. At that moment, she felt a puff of wind lightly brush her cheek. Haruka had literally blown her a kiss.

_Oh, to hell with it! _

"You always do this!" she growled, seizing her troublesome friend and hefting her over one shoulder, clearly preparing to hurl her down the hall like a javelin.

"Why don't you go flirt with Neptune instead of trying to chop down a tree with a hammer here?"

"Fine, I'll do that! She knows a good thing when she sees it, unlike certain people who shall remain nameless."

The weight of those words, negligible to begin with, was further diminished as their speaker unwillingly flew through the air and toward an eagerly waiting stone wall. The mild glee that had been evident in her last remark transformed into visible concern as the wall drew nearer much more quickly than she had expected, and suddenly, just before impact, her body melted away into wind, leaving behind a fluttering pile of brightly colored garments.

A small glow of triumph lit within Makoto at the sight. If her rival had been too rushed to bring her clothes along during her little disappearing trick, it had been a victory, however small. It also meant that the other would surely be too embarrassed by her failure to persist in her attempt to gain entry to the Jovian's rooms.

"Good _night, _Haruka!" Makoto declared with a decisive air.

The wind that was Uranus blew away in a swirl of muttered curses and idle threats, leaving in its wake a blast of air that scattered the discarded clothing, snarled up Makoto's hair, and caused her door to fly open with a crash.

Nothing stirred within, fortunately. It appeared that Ami had chosen to rest and recover from her injuries, and that she could sleep through just about anything... or pretend to sleep, as the case may be.

_I suppose that's her choice. _

Not giving the girl in her bed another thought, Makoto set about putting away the weapons she had worn.

This was made considerably more difficult by the fact that her hair was now unruly enough to snag on anything and everything. Grumbling at her ongoing foul luck and disentangling one of the blades of her axe occupied enough of her attention that the sound of rustling paper and cloth nearly escaped her. Nearly.

She glanced over toward Ami, who was seemingly still asleep, albeit in a slightly different position than before. Under the bedclothes beside her guest, she also spotted a curious squarish lump, on which she intensified her focus for a moment before her feet got the message to carry her over to it. She roughly pulled back the sheet and revealed the not-so-unexpected book, but to her mild and somewhat uncomfortable surprise, it was not one of the few she had kept well-hidden in her room. Those were mostly campaign journals, but had the occasional personal musing thrown in for good measure, and for someone else to read that could not possibly end well. While it was something of a relief that such had not occurred, other questions remained, namely...

"How the hell did you get this? You left, didn't you?"

The startled Mercurian nearly set the record for the reclining high jump, and Makoto rode fiercely over her sudden outburst of stammering about how she'd only been trying to find the library.

"Are you out of your mind? Anyone could have seen you! _Anyone!_"

"Nobody..." Ami cautiously ventured, after a significant pause.

"And if someone were to realize who you are, where would you be? You'd doom yourself to die on someone else's terms."

The look on Ami's face strongly suggested that she was thinking _As opposed to yours?_

_And no doubt it would all find its way back to me before I was ready. And that hesitation of hers... _

"So, nobody did what?" She angrily grabbed the sheet in her fist again. "Nobody saw you?" The fabric tore to shreds under the force of her grip. "Nobody recognized you? Nobody ran off and reported to some high Mercurian official that they'd seen and recognized you?"

"There's a chance that I was seen, but definitely not recognized. I'm not stupid; I borrowed your cloak on the very off chance that a Mercurian spy was stationed somewhere in the corridors between here and the library, camouflaging himself against one of these brilliant white marble walls. Or perhaps they gave up on that, climbed up the gleaming walls, and are observing all that goes on in every corridor from comfortable perches on the ceiling. Especially since it's a well-known fact that nobody in a castle ever looks up!"

"They really _are _that cunning?"

"Oh, yes, they are! For all I know there was a spy hidden under my cloak the whole time without me noticing!"

"For all _I _know, there really _was!" _Makoto muttered, glaring down at her significantly.

"Truthfully, even if someone had noticed that I was marked and realized something was wrong with that, and even if they thought they should contact Mercurians instead of just shrugging and saying 'Well, that's odd,' the chances of them actually listening to a foreigner are nil to, well, right next to nil. Furthermore, since I am 'dead,' I doubt they'll bother sending more than one person to check out the rumor, if that."

Her mind whirling, Makoto released the sheet, sending the ripped scraps fluttering away. A few of those scraps fled beneath the bed as a sudden chilly draft swept through the room.

_I was just thoroughly shut up, I think... So, new sheets, new door, new pride... and a slight change of subject. _

"What did you want with _The Decline and Fall of the Martian Empire_, anyway?" she inquired, striving for a more conversational tone post-violent-outburst.

"Well, I was admiring your collection, and I came across a particularly curious specimen of old Mercurian swordsmithing. There seemed to be a little more to it than an ordinary weapon, and I wondered about the details of its origin."

Makoto looked up sheepishly from her futile efforts to smooth out the now-sundered sheets.

"Oh, that. Did you... actually touch the thing?"

It took an impressive amount of willpower for Makoto to keep her composure steady as she watched a look of pained, disappointment confirmation flash across Ami's face.

_You'd think it'd feel better to have caught a Mercurian off guard. ... Who am I kidding: I don't want her--I mean, a strategist of mine--to feel that I'm that devious; I mean, that'd make such a person feel less valued, and that's just bad policy for dealing with one's...strategist. That's it._

The sheet nearly suffered further injury as Makoto thoughtlessly clutched at it again, only to be saved as its original occupant tugged it aside to clear room to sit next to the Jovian. Their positions now equalized, Ami saw fit to respond.

"Why do you ask?"

"You'd know if you had."

To Makoto's surprise, that statement actually seemed to relax the girl beside her.

"Oh, that... Yes, I did touch it. That's what piqued my interest, actually."

_Heh, I could get to like this girl... or rather, I could get to not mind having her around. Which is a good feature in a strategist. And if the visions that sword causes just _interested _her, her stomach must be stronger than I thought._

"If you'd just asked me, I could have told you that particular sword was made specifically for killing Martians. Of course, it's effective on anyone, as you saw, but if you'll take a note of this angle here for a start..."

Makoto found herself launching involuntarily into full explanatory mode, powerless to curb her words and control her actions in the face of her love of weaponry. In the back of her mind lurked a suspicion that she could have fought it, maybe, but this simply felt right. Her impromptu lecture covered everything from the specifics of the weapon's design and manufacture to the quirks of Martian anatomy, the latter of which she found herself physically illustrating to some extent upon her captive audience. In one particular instance, said audience turned the tables on her, without her completely registering that someone had laid a hand upon her.

-------------

_So she _has _found someone, _thought a passing breeze. _She's really just that dense. Nobody touches her like that and gets away with it. I've certainly tried, and failed, often enough._

Haruka swirled around near the broken door in her wind form, watching the pair with interest, her original purpose for entering forgotten, at least until she spotted it.

-------------

"I hate to interrupt what has been a most edifying lecture," said Ami, raising a curious eyebrow at what seemed to be a point several feet behind Makoto, "but you might not want to lose that, and it seems to be bent on escape..."

The Jovian turned slightly to see a single white silk stocking fluttering in mid-air and making its way steadily towards the door.

"That's. Not. Mine."

Her voice rose steadily as she spoke, until she at last bellowed at a volume that made the windows rattle in their frames and which was, by pure coincidence, accompanied by a loud crack of thunder from yet another storm without.

"HARUKA!"


	14. Gold Comfort

Gold Comfort: In which Rei, Minako, and Ami are all proven capable of errors in judgment.

The less Rei said about the evening she had spent, the better. At least it was shaping up to be a more peaceful night than the last one had. She had managed to meditate properly and shield her mind, to complete her evening's prayers, to once again shoo her curious Lunar servants out, and, at last, to climb into her nicely warm bed for a well-deserved several hours of...

"HARUKA!!!"

...sleep.

_That does it. From this day forth, I'm going to stop thinking things like that, _she decided as angry lightning flashed and the air was rent with a mighty thunderclap once again. _Irony stopped being funny ages ago._

In a remarkably fortunate turn of events, however, life in the Princesses' tower seemed to return to its prior calm shortly after this outburst. Only a few exceptionally angry mutterings and rumblings above her indicated that anything was amiss, and soon enough, these too faded into nothing as someone in plate armor tore off down a passage into the main body of the palace.

For once, she was able to let all her troubles melt away into the now-silent darkness. This might have been merely the result of her having buried herself under her blanket and clamped an oversized pillow over her head with both stubborn arms just in case the outside world decided to rain more noise and confusion upon the area, but at this point she honestly did not care. After all, silence was...

"Mars!"

...golden.

_Blast. It's Minako._

"What, do you want to complain to me about the way your transparent chain mail pinches your points of interest? Go away!" she called, briefly removing the pillow from its place and trying to ward off subconscious thoughts about Minako's points of interest.

"Let me in!"

"What part of 'Go away!' is such a mystery to you?"

"I need healing! You can't refuse me that!"

That much was true, even in spite of her counterpart's persistent overacting. As long as they were not at war, Rei's vows compelled her to provide any healing that was requested of her in good faith. Grumbling, she rose and padded out of her bedroom into the small receiving room that thankfully separated it from the main door. As soon as she had thrown back the bolt, Minako pushed this door open and stepped in. Worse yet, she looked like she might have been preparing to camp out.

"I don't know why you've brought that. You're not going to be here long."

"You know I'm delicate, and it's not just the usual wear and tear," Minako pouted, tucking the embroidered silk cushion Rei had indicated under her 'delicate' rear before sitting on one of the stone benches in the antechamber. "You breathed fire on me. Burns..."

"...can be treated quickly and easily with my remedies, especially when they're as minor as yours surely are," Rei finished peevishly. "And delicate isn't exactly the word that comes to mind."

"I don't have to take this, you know."

"Then why did you even bother coming over here?"

"To get my feet fixed... again!" Minako shot back hotly.

"Surely you have your own medicine for it. Aren't you supposedly important where you come from?"

"Well... this way I get to watch you do it, of course."

"Hmph."

Once again, Rei went over to the box where she kept her supplies and carefully pulled out several little jars. She could feel Venus' startling blue eyes striving to sear provocative slits up the back of her nightdress while she worked, crushing petals, roots and berries with a mortar and pestle, sprinkling in the appropriate powdered minerals and adding a few measures of a tincture that made the whole mess smoke slightly and smell of rotting wood.

As the smoke drifted behind her, revolted noises came back the other way.

"Is that going to go on me? It'll stink up my quarters!"

"You won't even notice it after a while."

Rei continued to mix until the preparation was of a uniform consistency.

"Now put out your foot. I want to get this over with."

And here she was again, kneeling on her stone floor with one of Minako's feet in her hands, wasting imported remedies on someone who hadn't the self-discipline to keep from provoking Rei for her own amusement, and as such would probably end up with the same injuries all over again. It was not worth her time.

She pushed that thought from her mind. Every person had something to them that made them worth healing, even if it was only the ability to thoroughly test Rei's own faith and patience.

_Not to mention my self control_, Rei reminded herself as she looked up. For all her defects of character and disgustingly immoral behavior, Minako's looks were truly stunning. She was, physically speaking, exactly the type of girl the Martian had pursued in her younger and more carefree years, or she would have been, had she not been in another class entirely . Her hands shook slightly before she could get them under control again, and all of Minako's leg muscles seemed to tense up suddenly in pain.

"Ow! Be careful with that; it's priceless, you know!"

_Damn it, Rei. Mind on your work, _she admonished herself, carefully spreading the salve where the accessible skin of the foot she held was blistered and blackened. Whatever she had said before in trying to shut the girl up, she could tell from the charring, to say nothing of the smell, that these were no minor burns after all. As much as she could manage, she worked under the edge of the metal shoe, which had obviously not helped Minako's cause. Hopefully, the medicine was liquid enough to reach what she could not. Now, if she could just slip part of the bandage under the obstructing piece of hardware, she would be on the home stretch, at least for this side...

A sharp pain in her hand alerted her to the fact that the damn thing had caught her finger, pinning it firmly to Minako's bolt-pierced ankle. She drew in her breath sharply.

"What's wrong now? Realizing the extent of the damage?"

Rei growled in frustration, thinking it ought to be obvious. "My finger is stuck in your..."

"That's what _she_ said," Minako responded. It sounded rather automatic, but at the same time, it seemed to amuse her.

"To whom are you referring?" she looked up at Minako again, and forgot her problem for a fraction of a second. The Venusian looked slightly disappointed.

"Oh, never heard that one... Never mind; you wouldn't appreciate it."

"Since when has that ever stopped you? Do you think I've appreciated your continual pursuit of me? Your unwillingness to take no for an answer unless it's accompanied by a blast of fire? Your constant, damnable...." She cut herself off before she let the word _temptation _leave her lips,and wrenched her finger out of the vice-like grip of the gold shoe, leaving behind several layers of skin and hissing again.

"Don't move around so much, or I won't be able to work!" Why was Minako grabbing for her injured hand? Rei smacked her away impatiently.

"What was that for?"

"You were getting in my way."

"I was just trying to see how bad it was."

"Don't pretend to concern yourself with the welfare of others. I know what you are."

"And what am I?"

"Take a good look at yourself some time, and then _you_ can tell _me." _

An awkward silence followed, during which Rei carefully tended to the other leg.

"We're done, here," she said at last. "You should leave."

"What? No, we're not; it's not healed yet."

"Damn it, Venus, I'm a junior priestess, not a miracle-worker! It will take longer because the damage was worse. Aren't you supposed to be a Senshi? Walk it off."

"But it still _hurts! _It's even worse than before in some places!"

"That means it's working. If it's too much for your delicate self, get some of your slaves to carry you. Whatever you do, walk, run, dance, ride in a litter, wriggle up the stairs on your stomach, I don't care! I've done all I can for you."

"Please, Rei... Just let me stay here until the pain's gone!" Rei stood up, only to catch widened eyes glistening with what probably wasn't _really_ the onset of desperate tears. Minako was obviously trying to work her stupid little eye-tricks again.

"I need to sleep. You and this weird new wounded heart act of yours can just get out! Here, I'll even hold the door for you."

She did as as she promised, hauling the Venusian upright by the arm and propelling her into the hall. She slammed the stone portal shut behind her and barred it with a decisive clank before sinking to the floor.

_Why do I feel guilty for throwing her out? She deserved what I did to her earlier. Feeling that pain could even be good for her, and there was no way I would ever let her stay longer than I had to. Even when my mind isn't wide open, she's unsettling. For all my talk, I don't even know if I'll be able to sleep now._

Rei set about putting away her tools and materials, sat for a while in inconclusive contemplation before the rekindled fire, and watched the rain that still swept across her balcony. It wasn't long before some kind of commotion erupted upstairs again, but that hardly fazed her. Sleep came for her in spite of it all, late and troubled with odd, indistinct dreams.

-------------------------------------

Minako's feet hurt, which was hardly new. They also itched dreadfully now, and the same tingling, crawling sensation that had so startled her the previous night was starting up again. However, she had come down to see Rei alone, and for some reason she was more determined than she'd ever been to make it back up there on her own. Perhaps it was the contempt with which Mars had suggested she call for her slaves to help her that spurred her on.

_She hates me; she hates everything about me... Or at least, whatever her perception of me is. If I want to get closer to her, I'll have to prove her wrong, and I'm not sure she'll even let me try to do that without burning me to a crisp in the process, _she thought, taking a moment to rest on the landing outside Rei's door and catch her bearings.

_But it's between pissing off Rei and pissing off my mother, and given _that _choice I'll take Rei, __she continued to think, beginning__ to pick her way laboriously up the spiraling staircase, occasionally dropping to hands and knees when another wave of pain hit her. _

_For a start, I need __to figure out what constant, damnable thing I am apparently doing to her and stop doing it. And in order to do that, I need to spy on her. Perhaps she will speak of it in an unguarded moment, and I'm unlikely to witness any of those without, once again, being rendered into blackened, spice-encrusted filet of Senshi of Venus, unless I resort to subterfuge, _she reasoned, passing the chambers of Princess Mercury, who was paying the price for overindulging her inexperienced stomach by being loudly and violently ill. _At some point, I also need to teach Sayori how to debauch herself properly. That should be fun._

_I'll get to it later, _she continued, now consistently crawling upwards, past Jupiter's unexpectedly open door. She halted in front of it, noting idly that someone seemed to have punched holes through it and that two of its hinges had been violently wrenched loose so that it hung comically crooked._ If I recall the layout of this place, her balcony is right above Mars's. And I haven't heard her clattering back from wherever she ran off to. __Interesting... _In point of fact, it was interesting enough to get her off all fours and to finally shake the inexplicable sense that she had been wearing a lampshade on her head from the moment she had started her ascent.

With a nervous gulp, she slipped through into Princess Jupiter's private quarters. The import of this fact was further impressed upon her by the huge collection of well-used and well-cared-for weapons decorating most of the walls and the grisly remains of presumably sentient beings adorning the rest. The whole place radiated a strong magical aura, as if all the weapons had been enhanced with spellwork or Senshi powers. It was enough to make the back of her neck prickle in constant warning. At least, it could have been that. I am being so stupid right now, there is no adequate word for it.

Even the bed seemed to have a magical presence concealed in it, and was the only part of the room that was _not _surprisingly neat. _Perhaps she just keeps more enchanted weapons in there, _Minako snickered to herself, trying to gain courage through silent mockery. _I mean, with a properly shaped mace, anything is possible! And that dagger on the bedside table might very well... _

"Hey!" she cried aloud in shock, recognizing the glowing, serpentine blade for what it was and reaching for it. "How in hell did she get hold of a... Ow!"

The cause of this "Ow!" was the thin hand, pale and disconcertingly cold, which had shot out of the rumpled bedclothes and laid hold of her wrist. She reacted instantly, using her powers to loose one of the chains from her dress and wrap it around her assailant's arm, violently pulling it tight with a thought. Whoever it was fell off the bed and grunted in pain before scrambling to her feet and glaring at Minako out of suspicious blue eyes.

The girl certainly seemed to be the worse for wear, dressed only in bandages, attempting to cover that which they did not with her free hand. Her forehead bore both a nasty-looking scar and, strangely, the planetary symbol of Mercury. Venus's immediate thought was that she, or someone like her, must have been the source of the horrible screaming she had heard from this vicinity the night before.

"Oh! I thought you were dead!" she exclaimed before she could stop herself, thinking along this line. "Or are you the new one?"

For some reason, this did not sit well with the other woman, if her sudden stiffening was to be believed. She took a few deep breaths, and then, with a voice that was far haughtier than her condition could possibly warrant, said, "I was told that the servants didn't dare enter."

_Servant?! Why, you little bitch! _"Take that tone with me again and I'll break your arm and make you answer to proper authorities for impersonating the Senshi of Mercury. Who in the Kingdoms are you really, anyway?" Minako willed the capturing chain to tighten significantly and smiled, confident that the upper hand was hers.

"You'll break my arm?" the girl drew out the words with derision and incredulity. "Ha! Do you know who I live with? What I go through on a daily basis?"

"I think I might have _some_ idea," Minako replied guardedly, certainly not snickering behind her hand or anything like that. "I assume by now that you've realized one of your mistakes: that I'm Princess Venus, not the chambermaid?"

"Upon further observation of your manners, yes. Since you are someone _very_ important, of course, it's always yours to do as you like. However, you should know attacking me would be an unwise move for you."

"What, are you some kind of spy for the King of Mercury?"

The blue-haired girl's eyes widened in shock, telling Minako all she needed to know.

_Damn, I'm good. _

"Well then, spy, if you don't want me to reveal your exact nature to Jupiter, you will kindly omit my presence here from any conversations with her in future. I have business on the balcony and do not wish to be disturbed..." she turned to go, and then quickly turned back.

"But I have to ask... Why the mark?" She tapped her own forehead, where the sign of Venus was mostly obscured by the hair that had fallen into her face.

The Mercurian spy raised a suggestive eyebrow at her. "Why do you _think?"_

Minako finally let her control slip and snickered, before making her way outside. Once there, she detached another, thicker chain from her rapidly diminishing dress and looped it around a marble baluster. She climbed down it and then grabbed the edge of the balcony for support and hung there.

Rei's balcony below was quiet for the moment, but Minako's heart surged with triumph and she nearly let out a whoop.

Everything was working according to plan.


End file.
